Portobello Page 18

  Dawn was breaking. The eastern sky over Kilburn and Maida Vale had turned a pale and gleaming grey. Without a word to the woman and her husband, he turned and walked away. His feet seemed to move mechanically without his taking thought or even moving them himself. It was automatic, this slow trudging, his mind empty, his steps taking him down the Portobello Road, past the closed shops. His backpack bumped against his spine. An allnight café was open, a couple of men inside drinking tea. Another one stood outside smoking. Lance went on, past the Electric Cinema, past the houses painted ice-cream colours, down into Notting Hill Gate. There in a shop doorway, resting his head on a black plastic bag of rubbish, he curled up and fell instantly asleep.

  Helping the police with their enquiries brought Uncle Gib a lot of pleasure. It was a new experience for him to find himself, so to speak, on the right side of the law. Neither the detective sergeant nor the detective constable who spoke to him seemed to know anything of his past history. To them he was simply an elderly householder, respectable, innocent, hard done-by, who had suffered the misfortune of having his home destroyed by an arsonist and murderer. By the time they came to interview him at the Perkinses' it was known that the fire had been started deliberately and that its victim was Uncle Gib's Romanian lodger.

  The hospital had kept him in only until the afternoon following the fire. They had asked him if there was anyone they should notify and he had told them to phone Reuben and Maybelle Perkins. Within the hour both were at his bedside, overflowing with sympathy while not making any direct offer of accommodation. The first thing Uncle Gib did was borrow Maybelle's mobile, get the nurse to bring him the phone book (Business and Services edition) and call his insurance company. That out of the way and the assessor due to come next morning, he informed the Perkinses that he would be staying with them for the foreseeable future. They had brought him a copy of the Evening Standard in which the fire was the lead story and the rest of their visit passed in speculation as to how the newspaper had got hold of a head and shoulders photograph of Dorian Lupescu. No one mentioned Lance until the police did. Or, rather, until Uncle Gib did when the police talked to him.

  'My late wife's great-nephew,' he said in answer to their question about the occupants of the house. 'Lance Platt's his name. There's no knowing where he was. Keeps very late hours, he does.'

  'Have you any idea where he is now, Mr Gibson?'

  'Not a clue.' Uncle Gib held out his cigarette packet to the two policemen and, when his offer was refused, lit one himself. The worst part of his few hours in hospital had been nicotine deprivation. 'He never tells me where he goes. I took him in out of the kindness of my heart when his mum and dad wouldn't have him no more. That was after he'd broke a woman's jaw he was living in sin with.'

  'Can you tell us where he works?'

  Uncle Gib laughed, then told them not to make him laugh. 'He's on the benefit, isn't he? What else?'

  He gave them Lance's parents' address. They weren't his relatives but Auntie Ivy's. Not knowing Gemma's address or, come to that, her name, he described to them where she lived. They couldn't miss it. All they had to do was follow the graffiti. 'He's got aunts and uncles all over the place,' he said with relish. 'Mates too, the same sort as he is.'

  If Maybelle Perkins was dismayed at finding herself saddled with Gilbert Gibson as a non-paying guest, she gave no sign of it. It was many years since he had slept in such a clean well-appointed bedroom, if he ever had, or eaten at such a neat well-laden table. Maybelle made a special journey to the Portobello Road and the Spanish grocer's to buy his favourite chorizo.

  The police came back and told him that as a result of 'information received' (from the woman next door but they weren't divulging that) they knew that Lance Platt had said that Uncle Gib's house was 'a disgrace' and 'a shithole' that needed destroying. Did he know anything about that? Uncle Gib disliked his former home being referred to in these terms. It reflected badly on himself and might damage the rosy picture the police had of him. Angrily, he said that Lance was a liar and he personally had heard him say he resented Dorian Lupescu having the top flat because it was superior to his own accommodation.

  Only when he had moved in with Gemma, now more than a year ago, had any householders actually welcomed Lance into their home. His parents had turned him out, eventually Gemma had shown him the door, Uncle Gib had taken him in only because having him there was lucrative. So when he had presented himself at his nan's, dirty, unkempt, exhausted, instead of putting her arms round him and promising him supper at the Good King Billy, she unlocked her front door in silence and pushed him in ahead of her. Like most members of a large extended family, particularly those who are employed and in possession of a home, she lived in mild dread of her relatives wanting to move in with her.

  A Community Support officer had moved Lance off the Notting Hill Gate shop doorstep at nine in the morning. Five hours' fitful sleep had gone some way to healing the shock he had suffered, though it partially returned as he trudged up Ladbroke Grove, barely noticing the rather grand and elegant police station as he passed it. Who had set fire to the house? Where was Uncle Gib? He shook his head violently in answer to these questions and passers-by thought he was drunk. It took him a while to remember he had money, enough certainly to buy himself breakfast and take transport somewhere.

  Working for one's living was so rare in Lance's family that he had forgotten his nan had a job. He waited for her, sitting on the floor outside her flat until she came home. Gaining experience by then of spending time on doorsteps, he ate the coronation chicken sandwich he had bought on the way, drank from the can of Cobra and fell asleep again. It was nearly five when his nan arrived and he had only been inside ten minutes when she sent him out to buy takeaway for their supper. She put a note into his hand. 'Don't lose the receipt,' she said. 'I'll be wanting the change.'

  Talking of change, it was a funny thing how people you thought you could rely on became quite different people almost overnight. His nan had been lovely to him that day she'd bought him fish and chips and it was only a couple of weeks ago. But the fact was she'd changed in those ten minutes he was in the flat. She'd changed when he'd told her about Uncle Gib's house and that he'd nowhere to go. It would serve her right if he didn't go back with the Thai green curry but went off and threw himself on the mercy of his mum and dad. Only it wouldn't be a punishment, she'd be pleased. He began to feel very low, sinking down to rock-bottom.

  There was only one bedroom and that one was hers. He had to sleep on the sofa. That would have been all right if it had been a soft sofa with proper cushions but hers was covered in shiny and very slippery red leather. At some point in the night he slid off on to the floor. His fall woke him and he could hear his nan and her boyfriend laughing in the bedroom and some old country music from the seventies keening through the wall. In the morning she gave him what she called an ultimatum. He had never heard the word before but he soon knew what it meant.

  'You'll have to go, Lance. Dave's thinking of moving in and there's not room for three. You can stay one more night and then you'll have to be on your way.'

  As it happened, Lance never had another night on those slithery red cushions. He hardly anticipated it because by this time he confidently expected that the sale of Elizabeth Cherry's jewellery would make him a rich man. It was all there, safe in the backpack he had carted from one end of Notting Hill to the other and up to College Park. Once more he intended to carry it, this time across north London to Holloway and Poltimore Road. Then he remembered the foreign money. There was a place down the Portobello, for some reason called 'cambio', someone had told him exchanged money. Did that mean they'd change this stuff into real pounds? It did. He was amazed, as much as anything because he had guessed right. They gave him just under three hundred pounds for the notes in the three plastic bags.

  Now, at the tube station, there was no need to lower himself to the ground and wriggle, snake-like, under those two grey padded doors which only opened when a t
icket was inserted in the slot or touched to the circular pad. He had money and he felt quite virtuous when he spoke to the man behind the ticket window. The machine was too complicated for him. The house in Poltimore Road was found without trouble. It was in a street a lot like Uncle Gib's but not smartened up so much and like Uncle Gib's it had no doorbell, only a knocker. Lance knocked. A very thin dark girl answered and when Lance asked for Mr Crown, said, oh, you must mean Lew, and that he was away on his holidays. He'd gone to Corsica and wouldn't be back till Sunday week. Lance had no choice but to return to College Park and his nan's flat. It was a blow but things weren't as bad as they might have been.

  By the time his nan came home he had packed up the jewellery in newspaper and two plastic bags, securing the lot with elastic bands. The postmen dropped elastic bands all over the streets when they'd delivered the letters, so finding a couple of them wasn't a problem. Worse than chewing gum, his nan said it was. He handed her the package he'd made and asked her to look after it for him while he found somewhere to stay. This request seemed to touch her heart for she smiled for almost the first time since he'd arrived and said she was sorry to turn him out. She might be sorry but she didn't stay he could stop on. The package would be safe with her, she promised, and she didn't ask what it was.

  The two of them were watching World Athletics Highlights from Osaka, when the police came. His nan didn't want to switch off but they told her to in no uncertain terms. 'In case you're wondering how your uncle is,' the detective sergeant said, 'in case you've been worrying, he suffered a serious trauma but he's on the mend. He's staying with some very caring friends of his who know how to look after him.'

  'There's no need to be sarcastic,' said his nan.

  They ignored her.

  'Poor old boy,' said the detective constable unnecessarily. 'Now maybe you'd like to tell us where you were between 11 p.m. and 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday night. Tuesday, 14 August, that is, through to Wednesday, 15 August.'

  'Out,' said Lance, his mouth drying and his throat constricting.

  'Pardon? Would you repeat that?'

  'I was out.'

  'Out where?'

  'I was walking around.' He said it slowly and carefully.

  'Around where?' said the detective sergeant.

  Lance said he couldn't remember. He'd been into a pub. When they asked which pub he said he couldn't remember that either. Pressed to remember, he said he thought it might have been in Westbourne Park Road. He still couldn't guess what they were getting at and the most important thing to him was to keep them from finding out that he'd been breaking into a house in Pembridge Villas. Suppose they searched his nan's place and found that jewellery? Any minute now he expected them to say they'd like to search, they'd get a warrant and all that stuff you heard on the telly. But they didn't. They asked him why he had said Uncle Gib's house wanted destroying.

  'It's a shithole, innit?' he said. 'It's a tip.'

  'So you did say it? You wanted to destroy it?'

  'I never said that.' Lance was getting seriously alarmed.

  'Maybe you didn't say you resented Mr Lupescu having the top flat.'

  'Well, it wasn't fair, was it? Him coming over here from some foreign place and getting the best bit of the house.'

  His nan was looking more and more uneasy. 'I don't reckon you want to say any more off your own bat, Lance.' An inveterate viewer of The Bill and Kavanagh QC, 'You want to ask for a lawyer,' she said.

  'Good idea,' said the detective sergeant nastily. 'He can do that when we get him down the station. Which is like now.'

  Lance was so relieved that they didn't mention the old woman in Pembridge Villas or ask his nan to show them the package of jewellery, which he had been convinced they must suspect her of having, that he settled quite happily into the back of the car in which he was driven to Notting Hill police station. The lawyer they found for him was a very nice young lady who didn't look old enough to be a qualified solicitor.

  The questioning began again. It went on for hours and Lance expected to hear those fateful words, so often light-heartedly listened to on TV, about anything he said being repeated in court. But in the middle of the night they released him on police bail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Keeping an eye on Elizabeth Cherry's house, Susan Cox let herself in on Thursday morning and went dutifully from room to room. But her mind wasn't on what she was doing. She was thinking about the Notting Hill Carnival, due to begin on the coming Saturday and continue until the Monday evening. Its route this year was down Great Western Road from Westbourne Park Station, along Westbourne Grove and up Ladbroke Grove, a U-shape which would take in the Portobello Road but not enter it. The nearest it would pass to Pembridge Villas was when it sang and danced and rocked and rapped down Chepstow Road, but stragglers from it often strayed into these quiet sequestered streets and Susan feared for the small pieces of statuary in her front garden and the flowers in Elizabeth's. At one previous carnival a dancer in white satin with feathered angel's wings and a man dressed like Captain Hook had picked all the dahlias, and sat on the wall and rapped some lines of a current hit. Susan felt it incumbent upon her to stop that happening again, especially while Elizabeth was away.

  It was a cool, pale-grey day, dry and windless. Because there was no wind and the curtains hung straight in their regular pleats, she failed to see that there was no glass in one of the dining-room windows. Lance had been an apt pupil of Dwayne's and had cut cleanly. She saw the buddleia and bamboo in Elizabeth's garden, as she always did, without noticing the lack of an intervening pane. The kitchen seemed just as she had found it two days before apart from an odour of not very fresh tomato. It was unlike Elizabeth to have thrown into the bin a soup can without first rinsing it but perhaps she had been in a hurry. After more than a week it would, of course, smell unpleasant. Wrinkling her nose, Susan removed it, still inside its bin liner, and took it home with her to be washed and put conscientiously in the recycling.

  Making his preparations for the end, Joel now lived in as near to total darkness as is possible in a flat in the middle of London. No longer did light come through the glass pane in his front door. He had covered it up with a sheet of cardboard fixed to the frame with drawing pins. But there were lamps outside in the street that never went out. After the wettest, dullest, cloudiest summer since records began, the sun had begun to shine by day and the moon by night. Absolute darkness was impossible. Besides, his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. Like a cat, he could find his way from room to room almost as easily as if the place had been brightly lit.

  Noreen too had grown used to the way he lived. She came only three nights a week now and, to please him, brought with her a padded draught excluder in the shape of a snake, green and yellow with a forked tongue, which she laid along the bottom of her bedroom door. As well as draughts, it excluded the light from her bedside lamp. Linda no longer came. He couldn't understand why she was afraid of him and his home but she was. He had said nothing about her absence to Ella or his mother or Miss Crane. As for his father, no doubt he paid the bills without noticing or caring.

  He had accumulated a quantity of sleeping pills. The hospital dispensary had provided him with a supply, some of which he had never taken. Linda had told him she needed pills if she was to get any sleep under his roof and on her last visit she had been so nervous that she had left hers behind. When she came round for them next day he said he knew nothing about her Mogadon and that she had to accept. The best sleeping pills, the strongest and most numerous, came from his mother. Her doctor gave her as many sedatives as she wanted and she had just asked for double her usual prescription on the grounds that worry about her son kept her awake. Joel investigated her handbag under cover of the habitual darkness and added these to his cache.

  Noreen shopped for him on her way to Ludlow Mansions. The list he gave her always included meat and eggs and ready meals, and sometimes a bottle of wine. She wasn't surprised when he added gin and whisky to the list an
d she took it as a sign he was getting better. Cunningly, he wrote down mixed nuts as well and rice crackers. Starting to enjoy life, she told herself. Inviting friends round. Soon he'd be switching on lights and pulling up the blinds.

  But he wasn't enjoying life. Nor was he doing or planning to do what Ella or Miss Crane might have suspected had they known about the pills and the spirits. Ella hadn't come lately. His fault. He could have called her, sent for her, but that he was postponing until the right time came, the absolutely precise right time. He had given up walking. Miss Crane he continued to visit once a week, wearing sunglasses, going to her consulting room in a taxi and returning home in one. He talked to her about Mithras, making up most of what he said, quite enjoying his inventions. Perhaps the psychotherapist knew this but if she did she gave no sign.

  'He's started telling me to kill people with red hair,' he said. Miss Crane had red hair. 'When demons are incarnated their hair turns red.' She made no answer, not even nodding. 'I don't want to obey him because then he'll know he controls me.'

  Mithras – the real Mithras – was visible more often to him now. In every beam of light that managed to infiltrate its way into the flat, he saw him. He told Miss Crane he never saw Mithras, only heard his voice. He told her Mithras said Ella and his mother and Noreen were demons, and he would have to kill them if he wanted peace of mind and happiness. They weren't red-headed but they were women and that was enough. Miss Crane said nothing. A thin, birdlike woman, her hair a mass of tight curls, she sat quite still, sometimes writing words on a sheet of paper. Joel only said those things because he had read that this is how schizophrenics behave. They hear voices and the voices tell them to commit crimes. It would be quite interesting to act the part of a schizophrenic, like a kind of hobby. Joel had never had a hobby of any sort. All Miss Crane said was that he should continue with his medication and she'd see him next week. On his way home, his hood up and wearing his strongest sunglasses, Joel went into a bookshop and bought a book about schizophrenia.