The Rottweiler (v5) Read online

  ‘A bit old! I’d have to run away from home, you know, and that’d be a wrench. I wouldn’t like to leave my poor mum.’

  The bell on the street door rang and a man came in, looking for a plant stand. Preferably wrought iron. Zeinab gave him one of her smiles. ‘We’ve got a lovely jardinière I’d like to show you. It came over from France only yesterday.’

  In fact, it had come from a junk shop having a clearance sale in Church Street. The customer gazed at Zeinab who, squatting down beside the jaguar to pull this three-legged object out from under a pile of Indian bedspreads, turned her face up to him and lifted from it the two wings of black hair like someone unveiling a beautiful picture.

  ‘Very nice,’ he mumbled. ‘How much is it?’ He didn’t demur, though Zeinab had added twenty pounds on to the agreed price. Men seldom tried bargaining when she was selling them something. ‘Don’t bother to wrap it up.’

  The street door was held open for him as he struggled out with his purchase. A shy man, almost bowled over, he took courage once on the pavement and said, ‘Goodbye. It was very nice to meet you.’

  Inez couldn’t help laughing. She had to admit business had taken a turn for the better since Zeinab had worked for her. She watched him go off in the direction of Paddington Station. He wasn’t going to take it on a train, was he? It was nearly as tall as he. She noticed that the sky had clouded over. Why was it you never seemed to get a fine day any more, only days that started off fine? The dirty white van had gone and another, cleaner, one was being parked in it place. Will Cobbett got out of it and then the driver got out. Inez and Zeinab watched from the window. They saw everything that went on in Star Street and one of then usually provided a running commentary.

  ‘That one that’s got out, that’s the one called Keith what Will works for,’ said Zeinab. ‘He’ll be going down the Edgware Road to the building materials place. He always comes over here on account of it’s cheaper. What’s Will doing home at this hour? He’s coming in.’

  ‘I expect he’s forgotten his tools. He often does.’

  Will Cobbett was the only tenant who hardly ever came through the shop. He went in by the tenants’ door at the side. The two women heard his footsteps going up the stairs.

  ‘What’s with him?’ said Zeinab. ‘You know what Freddy says about him? He says he’s a couple of dips short of a limbo.’

  Inez was shocked. ‘That’s nasty. I’m surprised at Freddy. Will’s what used to be called ESN, educationally sub-normal, but now it’s “learning difficulties”. He’s good-looking enough, I must say, learning difficulties or not.’

  ‘Looks aren’t everything,’ said Zeinab, for whom they were. ‘I like a man to be intelligent. Sophisticated and intelligent. You won’t mind if I go out for an hour, will you? I’m supposed to be having lunch with Rowley Woodhouse.’

  Inez looked at her watch. It was just gone half past twelve. ‘You’ll be back around half past two then,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s being nasty now? I can’t help it if I’ve no concept of time. I wonder if you can go to a class in time management? I’ve been thinking of an elocution course. My dad says I ought to learn to speak right, though him and mum have got accents straight out of downtown Islamabad. I’d better go or Rowley’ll create.’

  Inez recalled how Martin had taught elocution for a while. That was before Forsyth and the big-time, of course. He’d been teaching and taking bit parts when she first met him. His voice had been beautiful, too patrician for a detective inspector on the television now but not in the eighties. She listened to Will’s footsteps drumming down the stairs. He ran out to the van, his toolbag in his hand, just as the traffic warden arrived. Then Keith appeared from the other direction. Inez watched the ensuing argument. Bystanders always do watch confrontations between traffic wardens and hapless drivers, wistfully hoping for a punch-up. Inez wouldn’t go as far as that. But she thought Keith ought to pay up, he ought to know a double yellow line when he saw one.

  She waited while two blonde women with thickly painted faces wandered round the shop, picking up glass fruit and figures which might or might not have been Netsuke. They were ‘just looking’, they said. Once they had gone, checking that the doorbell was in working order, she went into the kitchen at the back and switched on the television for the one o’clock news. The newscaster had put on that expression presenters such as he are (presumably) trained to assume when the first item is grim or depressing, as in the case of the girl murdered in Boston Place the night before. She had been identified as Caroline Dansk of Park Road, NW1. She must have come down Park Road, thought Inez, crossed over Rossmore and gone down into Boston Place on her way to somewhere, perhaps to the station. Poor little thing, only twenty-one.

  The picture switched to the trainline out of Marylebone and the street running alongside it, with its high brick wall. Quite upmarket, the houses smartened up and trees planted in the pavement. Police were about and police vans and crime tape everywhere, the usual small crowd gathered behind, seeking what it could devour. No photograph of Caroline Dansk yet and no TV appearance of her distraught parents. That would come in due time. As no doubt would a description of the object her killer had taken from her after he had stifled her life out with that garrotte thing.

  If it was the same man. They could only tell, now the biting had proved a nonsense and therefore the sobriquet inappropriate, by the stealing of one small object. These young people had so much, thought Inez, all of them with computers and digital cameras and mobile phones, unlike in her day. A sinister expression that, as if everyone had her day and when it was over started on the long decline into night, twilight first, then dusk and finally the darkness. Her day had come quite late in life, only really begun when she met Martin, and it was after he died that the daylight began to dim. Come on, Inez, she said to herself, that won’t do. Get yourself some lunch, as you’ve no Rowley Woodhouse or Morton Phibling to get it for you, and switch on to something more cheerful. She made herself a ham sandwich and got out the Branston pickle but she didn’t want any more tea, a Diet Coke would be all right and the caffeine would wake her up for the afternoon.

  I wonder what he’s taken off this girl? I wonder who he is and where he lives, if he has a wife, children, friends. Why does he do it and when and where will he do it again? There was something degrading in speculating about such things but almost inescapable. She couldn’t help being curious, though Martin could have helped it, risen above such relish for ugly details. Perhaps it was because he was obliged to involve himself in fictitious crime each time he acted in a Forsyth production, that he wanted nothing to do with the reality.

  The doorbell rang. Inez wiped her lips and went back into the shop.

  CHAPTER 2

  Saturdays were to be treasured. Sundays weren’t the same at all because Monday loomed dangerously near and hung over the day, reminding you that only one night lay ahead before the grind began again. Not that Becky Cobbett disliked her job. Far from it. Hadn’t it raised her up the class ladder and given her all this? By ‘all this’, vaguely waving one hand, she meant the large, comfortable flat in Gloucester Avenue, the Shaker furniture, the rings on her fingers and the small Mercedes parked at the kerb. All of it achieved without the intervention of a man. Men there had been but all of them less successful than she, none of them remarkable earners and not a serious present giver among them.

  Realising it was Saturday within seconds of waking was one of the high spots of her week. If she wasn’t going away somewhere or her nephew wasn’t coming over, the morning always followed the same course—well, and half the afternoon too because she’d have lunch out. It wasn’t always the West End she went to, Knightsbridge sometimes and Covent Garden at other times. Today was an Oxford Street and Bond Street day. She might not buy anything big but she would buy something, little items, small toys really, a lipstick, a CD, a scarf, a bottle of bath oil or a bestseller from the top ten. The window shopping was extensive, and the inside-the-store-gazing s
hopping and the exploration of departments she had never visited before, and the slow considered purchase of some cosmetic in order to get the free gift. Her bathroom cabinet was stuffed full of toilet bags in every shape and colour because they were what had contained the free gifts. Large items of clothing were a different matter, choosing them a serious business and one to which she devoted much prior thought.

  ‘I’m not rich,’ she was in the habit of saying, ‘but I think I can say I’m well-off.’

  Clothes she bought rarely and when she did they were very good and very expensive, but selecting them and paying for them was not to be undertaken on these Saturday jaunts. Those were entirely frivolous and had nothing to do with finding a new black suit for the office or a clingy dress for the firm’s annual dinner. Everything about Saturdays was to be enjoyed light-heartedly from the moment she left the house to get the tube from Camden Town station, to her return home five or six hours later in a taxi.

  She never wasted time having coffee, but pursued her chosen itinerary until just before one. Then it was time to find a restaurant or a cafeteria or oyster bar inside a store and have her lunch. Afterwards there were a few more shops to be visited, perhaps even to turn her thoughts towards those serious clothes purchases but only in cautious anticipation. It was out of the question for her actually to buy anything or even make up her mind to buy it at some future date. Garments in that price range would also be bought on a Saturday but a Saturday set aside for that purpose, the frivolity and the enjoyment absent.

  She knew all the best spots for picking up a cab. Unlike those who barked out a command to the driver, she always spoke politely.

  ‘Would you take me to Gloucester Avenue, please?’

  They didn’t always know where it was but confused it with Gloucester Terrace or Gloucester Place or Gloucester Road.

  ‘North of Regent’s Park,’ she usually said. ‘You go towards Camden Town and turn left at the lights.’

  She asked him to stop while she bought a Standard. At home again she made tea, spent ten minutes with the paper. That poor young girl who had been strangled in Boston Place the night before had her picture all over the front page. ‘Caroline Dansk, 21’, the caption said, latest victim of the Rottweiler.

  ‘Police have no new information as to the identity of the shadowy figure seen running away from the crime scene,’ Becky read. ‘“It is impossible to say”, said a spokeperson, “whether this was a man or a woman.” The garotter is distinguished by his habit of taking some small artefact from the victim’s body and by a more macabre detail, a bite. This time the stolen object seems to have been a keyring, from which Ms Dansk’s keys had been removed and left in her bag. However, sources close to the family say there was no sign of a bite.

  ‘“Caroline had her keys on a gold keyring with a Scottie dog fob,” said her stepfather, Mr Colin Ponti, 47. “It was a Christmas present from a friend. She never went out without it.”

  ‘Noreen Ponti, Caroline’s mother, was too distraught to speak to the media …’

  Becky shook her head, folded up the paper and examined what she had bought. If it was music she played it, leaning back in an armchair. The bag which held the free gifts had to be opened and each sachet or small bottle examined. This time it was a CD and she put it into her Walkman, resting her head against a cushion and closing her eyes. This evening she would devote to watching television or the video from the cassette she had also bought while she was out.

  All in all it was continuous hedonistic pleasure, innocently luxurious and self-indulgent. But it wasn’t unalloyed. There was always, as she had overheard someone say in Oxford Street, a bone in the kebab. The bone in her kebab was her outsize sense of guilt and this was particularly active on a Saturday, especially this Saturday when she knew quite well she hadn’t seen Will for over a week and instead of strolling down South Molton Street she should have been on the phone inviting him to lunch. Lunch, not dinner. They had had their main meal at midday in the children’s home, he had got used to it and that was what he still liked best.

  Becky had managed to banish thoughts of her nephew from her mind while she was choosing the night cream and the body toner that would make her eligible for the free gift. She had kept those thoughts away while she was lunching at Selfridges, but now she was home and the CD had come to an end, they came flying back on the dark wings of guilt. Will would have been all alone. In spite of looking like a heavier and more burly David Beckham, he was too simple and naïve to make friends, too diffident to take himself alone to the cinema or some sporting event. Tonight, with luck, the man whom he called his friend, who had been one of the social workers in the home, might take him across to the Monkey Puzzle for a drink but that didn’t happen every Saturday or even every other. Besides, someone else’s intervention did nothing to dispel her own feelings that she had failed Will and been failing him for twenty years. Self-disgust washed over her, making her feel quite sick, when she thought how she had spent her day and how much she had enjoyed it.

  Becky’s sister Anne had been killed in a car crash. The car belonged to a man who was driving her to Cambridge to meet his parents, the first man Anne had been out with since Will was born. Not that she often went out with him. That was the first time for months. The car was hit head-on by a lorry on the M11. Its driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed through the barrier on the central reservation. He died and Anne died while the man she had almost decided to marry lost both his legs.

  Two policemen came to Anne’s flat to tell Becky about the accident. She had been looking after Will, aged three. Of course she stayed with him, taking a fortnight off work. She and Anne had been very close, she was almost as familiar to Will as his own mother, and she had been in the habit of saying that she had all the pleasures of motherhood without its responsibilities. That remark came back to her in the days that followed Anne’s death. Would she be expected to take Anne’s place, stay with Will and be a mother to him? Would she be expected to adopt him?

  Now she remembered how she had often told Anne she loved him as if he were her own. Was that true? At the time she was working for a travel agent and studying for a degree in business management in the evenings. That would go if she became a foster-mother to Will, there wouldn’t be any evenings. Going to work at all would be hard enough. But, of course—what was she thinking of?—he had a father. She tracked him down and phoned him. He had never paid any child support and his visits to Will had been rare but now he said he would come.

  Becky took another two weeks off and her boss wasn’t very pleased. While she was at home she managed to get Will into a nursery and, bracing herself to do it, screwing up her courage, she phoned Social Services to acquaint them with the situation. Will’s father came and Will, who was friendly and trusting with everyone—too friendly and trusting—sat on his knee while the man told Becky how impossible it would be for him to have the little boy living with him: his wife was only nineteen and she was pregnant, she couldn’t be expected to look after a child of three as well.

  Will was taken into care. Becky cried for most of the night before Social Services came to take him away, but she couldn’t keep him, she couldn’t. A little comfort was to be derived from the happy and innocent way he took the social worker’s hand and smiled at her. He will be all right, she kept saying to herself, he will be all right, he will be better than he would be with me, he will go to good foster-parents or maybe someone longing for a child will adopt him. But no one did. Beautiful though he was and sweet-natured and good—too good—no one wanted a child who had ‘something wrong with him’. Becky’s worst torment was wondering whether he was this way because she had allowed him to be taken into care, if she had done it by her selfishness. She spent long hours trying to recall instances of his difference from other children before his mother’s death and she did manage to recall Anne’s saying he was too quiet, too well-behaved, not wild and rebellious the way a little boy should be. Remorse still haunted her.

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nbsp; She compensated, or tried to, by visiting him at the home, which was frowned on, and taking him out, which had limited approval. As her fortunes improved and her business prospered, she began buying him presents she had to keep in her own home lest they excite envy in the other children. When he was twelve she offered to pay the fees of a private school in New England where pupils of his sort received one-to-one attention. Social Services put a stop to that. They were very progressive, very left-wing, and they reminded Becky that she had no control over his fate or future, she was only his aunt. As for his father, he had gone off to Australia, leaving behind another woman and a child.

  ‘The ball is in our court, Ms Cobbett,’ said Will’s social worker. ‘The decision is down to us.’

  So Will went to a special school where all the children had learning difficulties, a school without enough teachers and where the ones it had were all exhausted by the amount of paperwork they had to do. It was remarkable to Becky that he could read at all, and he could only when the words were short and simple, but he was rather good at sums. Perhaps he would have done no better at the Vermont private school. What would become of him when he was sixteen and had to leave? How would he earn a living?

  Social Services found him a place on a college building course. He was nice to everyone, polite and anxious to learn, but the diagrams he was expected to look at, the technical handbooks he was expected to read, meant nothing to him. There was no simple arithmetic, only weights and measures and calculations, all of which were beyond him. He was living at the time in a house occupied by six young people who had been in care and selected to get on together, but although he never complained, Becky sensed that they teased or bullied him. What would he like to do?

  ‘Live with you,’ he said.

  The ground under her feet shifted, her world turned over. Afterwards she thought it was the worst moment of her life. She had a boyfriend at the time who spent Saturday and Sunday nights with her and the occasional night in the week. When he wasn’t there she needed her peace, her special Saturday mornings. But saying what she had to say was her low point.