The Keys to the Street (25 page)

If Alistair had come onto the hill it wasn’t through that gate. She
gave him ten minutes and, when he still hadn’t appeared, began to walk along the path that runs parallel to Albert Road. Her pale cream shoes were streaked with green smears and threads on the hem of her skirt had been pulled by brambles. It didn’t seem important.

There must be no chance of meeting Alistair head-on, so Regent’s Park Road should be avoided. She began to run again, lightly, not too fast, because running made her feel free. It came to her that she had actually told Alistair she didn’t want to see him again, she had told him things were over between them and told him why, and this pleased her, she felt it had been brave of her. Lately she had been thinking a lot about her own passive gentle temperament, her inability to say no, her politeness and her acquiescence, and she had wondered if she was one of those said to be born to be victims. Those people were attracted to the strong and aggressive and they to the victims. But perhaps, to coincide with her meeting Leo, she was changing, asserting herself, leaving victimhood behind. It was frightening to think of oneself as doomed to be used and maltreated by others, not a free agent and master of one’s fate.

Avoiding Regents Park Road was impossible, but she crossed it quickly, into Fitzroy Road. Wherever Alistair might be, he wouldn’t come into these streets; she was sure he was even more ignorant of the place than she. Slackening her pace, she slowed to a walk until she came to Chalcot Road, which forms the spine of Primrose Hill. She had read somewhere that there was once an old manor house of Chalcot here and that Chalk Farm itself was a corruption of the name. Alistair would be lost here, he would have turned back by now.

As Mary walked along the pretty, shabby, dusty street the thought came to her that perhaps it was unwise to visit Leo out of the blue. She did not know him well enough yet to drop in on him. The unkind and prejudiced things Alistair had said had given rise to these
misgivings. Surely she should discard them, forget them. Those allegations sprang from his jealousy and unaccountable hatred of “Oliver” that started long before she met him. But even so might she not be doing a risky thing?

She imagined Leo not alone. Not necessarily with another girl, not that, but with the brother he was so close to or even their mother or some friend to whom he would be reluctant to introduce her, or just—since he had only yesterday moved in—surrounded by disorder and chaos, in a panic of failure to cope.

The prospect of turning back, going back to Charlotte Cottage and spending a lonely evening with Gushi, kept her walking on. Suddenly she was at Edis Street. There it was, a left-hand turning of mid-Victorian terraced villas, more stucco, plaster scrollwork, untidy flowery front gardens, bicycles chained to fences. Three steps led up to a dark green front door. But first, dividing the small front garden from the pavement, black-painted, spiked, iron railings. She shivered inwardly. Did everybody in North-west One see railings where they had never noticed them before?

There was still time to turn back. In spite of herself, she imagined walking into his room and seeing a woman her own age sitting there, her shoes kicked off, a glass of wine in her hand. A dark woman, she thought, quite unlike herself, with a tangled bush of hair and a bright sparkling face. The idea of it brought her a wash of real anguish. But she pressed the bell marked with a newly printed card: L. Nash.

No voice came out of the grille. He must have seen her from a window. The door trembled and growled, came open as she pushed it. She started to walk up the stairs, more quickly when he called to her from above.

“Come up. How wonderful of you to come!”

He was standing in the open doorway. She was learning that he didn’t want to kiss or even touch her when first they met. It was just
that they stood close together for an instant, looking into each other’s faces. They did this now and she felt her own expression echoing his with a small conspiratorial smile.

It was an ordinary little room that he had, two open doors off it disclosing the whole of his small domain. A very tidy man might have been living there for six months, the kind of man with a place for everything and everything in that place. Roses from a garden, not a florist’s, filled a blue vase on the windowsill. He had been hanging curtains. One was up and the other, half its rings inserted, lay draped across the back of his single armchair.

“I was about to phone you and ask you to come,” he said, “but I didn’t need to. You read my mind.”

She looked about her and a warm joy flooded her, filling her body and her head, until it seemed it must break out of her in happy laughter. “I was afraid—well, a bit apprehensive about coming. I thought you might not be too pleased.”

He put his arms round her and laid his cheek against hers. She was aware as he held her of that peculiar feeling she had when with him of twinship, of being uncannily like him, older certainly, but physically so similar and with the same tentativeness, caution, shyness, gentleness, and fingertip-feeling sensitivity.

“I will always be too pleased,” he said. “I will be too pleased for words, for anything. I can’t tell you how pleased.” He saw her arm and frowned at the angry red marks. “Who has hurt you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter now, Leo.”

17

F
rom force of habit Bean had continued to take delivery of a newspaper after Maurice Clitheroe died, and one day he had come upon an article about sixteen homosexual men convicted of assault for practicing particularly violent sadomasochism. In spite of the participants’ admitted consent all had been sent to prison.

Bean heartily agreed with this verdict. In his view, consent or no consent, people needed protection from others’ perversions, and he, he told himself, should know. But he was disgusted to find this sort of thing in a newspaper, reminding him of what he hoped to have put behind him forever. Anyone might read it and get ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed their minds. That was the last time he was going to read that paper, or indeed any paper. What, after all, was the telly for but to provide a pleasanter and easier-on-the-eye alternative to all these
Times
es and
Daily
thises and thats?

Concentration wasn’t required to nearly the same extent. You could get up and make yourself a cup of tea or fetch in a cress and Marmite sandwich and when you got back it was still merrily spilling out the news, same faces, same music, and if the pictures were different you hardly noticed, you couldn’t remember what the last ones had been. Thus it was that, although Bean saw all about the murder on Primrose Hill, knew the victim was another vagrant, once again impaled on railing spikes, he had been out in the kitchen making a mug of Earl Grey when the man was identified. He hadn’t been much interested. If he thought about it at all it was to reflect
that the police hadn’t caught Cahill’s killer and that the chances were they didn’t try all that hard, weren’t bothered when the victim was one of those beggars.

He had breakfast television on while he ate his breakfast. It was orange juice, muesli, a Danish pastry, and a cup of tea, and in the mornings the news was the BBC’s offering, all those teenagers and cartoon bears and dinosaurs being a bit too much to stomach at seven-fifteen
A.M
. Nothing on it about the second dead man on the railings, that had been a flash in the pan, and he only kept the set on because he hadn’t quite finished his tea. Bean already had his new baseball cap on and his Marks and Spencer’s bottle-green cardigan, for the early mornings were chilly. He was thinking about switching off and setting forth to Mrs. Morosini’s, his first port of call, when the doorbell rang.

Nobody ever called at this hour. Mystified, on his way out with his key in his pocket, he went to answer the door. Two men were there, both young. Bean thought one of them looked only about seventeen. The older one had a hatchet face and pitted cheeks, the way it was quite fashionable to have if you were a pop star or in cowboy films. They didn’t look to him like police officers, but they said they were, an inspector and a sergeant, and they flashed warrant cards at him while they told him names he didn’t catch.

Bean always thought of sadomasochism, even now, after all this time. They had caught up with him, even though he had done nothing more than he was told.

“What d’you want?” he said, his voice squeaky.

“May we come in?”

“I was just going off to my work.”

They seemed to know all about his work and for some reason it amused them. The older one said he could give his work a miss that morning because, on second thought, instead of coming in they’d like him to accompany them to the police station. Then the younger one said there would be no harm in his phoning a client—one phone
call only, mind—to say he was canceling this morning’s walk.

Bean hardly knew whom to phone, who would be the best bet. He had to make up his mind fast and settled on Valerie Conway, back from holiday the day before, and in his estimation the closest to him of all of them in class and calling. The two policemen stood there watching him in a very laid-back sort of way.

“I’m not well,” he said when she answered. He didn’t know what he would have done if Mr. or Mrs. Cornell had answered. “I was wondering if you’d give the others a ring and let them know.”

“What, all five of them?”

“It wouldn’t take a minute. There’s Mrs. Morosini and her number is …”

“I’ll phone her,” said Valerie. “She can phone the others. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Laryngitis? It sounds like you’ve lost your voice.”

The policemen escorted Bean to their car. He told them he had never had anything to do with those perverts, only opened the door to them and looked after Mr. Clitheroe when he was hurt and handed over payment when he was unconscious. They were amused but seemed not to know what he was talking about. He was inside the station and in an interview room before he got an inkling and then it was slow in coming.

“You drew fifty pounds out of your bank account at the end of last week,” said the inspector, now understood by Bean to be called Marnock.

How did they know? How could they know? He nodded and his head went on nodding like one of those toy dogs people used to have in the rear windows of cars.

“What would that have been for, then?”

A phrase came to Bean from out of somewhere. “Day-to-day general running expenses,” he said and he tried to clear his throat.

“Got a cough, have you?” said the young one.

“Must be all that dog-walking in the damp,” said Marnock.
“Funny you’ve never drawn anything before for these day-to-day running expenses. Not for, let’s see—” he looked at a notebook on the table “—seven months. That’s right, seven months since you last made a withdrawal from that account.”

Now he was pretty sure none of it had anything to do with Clitheroe and his practices, Bean was gaining courage. He affected a final throat-clearing. “I don’t know what right you’ve got to go poking about in my private bank account,” he said. “What’s all this about?”

“Now he asks,” said the young one. “Who’s Mussolini, Leslie? I can call you Leslie, can’t I? Or do you prefer Les?”

If he hadn’t been so shocked at hearing the name of Mussolini uttered like that, Bean would have reacted violently to being called by his given name. He had hated it ever since his schooldays in that Hampshire village and since then no one had used it. He was always Bean. Bean, as far as everyone knew, was what he might have been christened. But hearing himself called Leslie was nothing to hearing the name he personally, he a one, had given to the anonymous hit man encountered once on the Hanover Gate bridge.

He tried playing the innocent. “He was Italian, like the leader of Italy in the war. Like Hitler.”

The change in Marnock was shocking. He seemed galvanized. He leapt to his feet and stood over Bean, shouting, “Don’t give me that. Don’t you play games with me. Who’s the man you called Mussolini when you were shooting your mouth off in the Globe?”

“I don’t know his name.” Bean’s voice was still strong, but he had started to shake. He tried to stop his knees knocking together. “I don’t know what he’s called. I called him Mussolini because he looks like him. The spitting image of him, only young like.”

They had this nasty way of changing the subject, just when you thought you were getting somewhere. “You don’t like homeless people, do you, Les?”

Bean picked what he thought was the politically correct thing to
say. “It’s not right for a great nation like ours to have beggars on its streets.”

Marnock laughed. It was as if he couldn’t help laughing, though he would have liked to. “So you’d solve the problem in Hitler’s way, would you? Couldn’t quite call it ethnic cleansing—the Final Solution, is that it?”

Maybe the young one could tell Bean hadn’t the least idea what Marnock meant, for he reverted to an earlier tack.

“What did you draw the money out for, Les?”

“It was for Mussolini, wasn’t it?” said Marnock. “What was he going to do for it?”