Portobello Page 22

  Lance bought his mother's aspirins and began the walk back to Kensal Road where his parents lived. But before he reached it he recalled his mother telling him that Uncle Gib had moved in with those god-botherers, the Perkinses, in Fermoy Road. Lance didn't know the number but he had no difficulty in finding the house. Where its neighbours each had a laurel bush in their front gardens, the Perkinses had a sign proclaiming Jesus Lives!. Lance rang the bell.

  There was no response. He rang again. This time he was aware of a flicker across the corner of his eye on the left side. Someone had twitched a curtain in the bay window. Then he noticed a narrow gap between the front door and its frame. The door wasn't shut but very slightly ajar. Expecting some kind of trap, he gave it a very cautious push. It swung open silently and, stepping over the threshold, he found himself in a narrow hallway.

  Framed texts on the walls told him that the better the day the better the deed and that if he honoured his father and mother his days would be long in the land. There was no one about but an ashtray on the windowsill full of stubs of a familiar brand was evidence of Uncle Gib's presence in the house. The silence was disconcerting. Lance belonged in a generation that feels uneasy unless there is a perpetual murmuring of voices or throb of pop in the background. But having come here and made his way in, he wanted to see Uncle Gib. He wanted to tell him the truth about where he had been that night for Uncle Gib had been a burglar himself once. He might be angry, he would call him a no-good sinner, but he would understand and he would know Lance couldn't have been responsible for burning his house down.

  Someone must be at home. They wouldn't have gone out and left the place open like that. Lance put his hand to the knob on the door on his left and turned it slowly clockwise. The door opened silently and he crept in. Afterwards he hardly knew why he hadn't screamed but he hadn't. Perhaps he'd been fascinated as well as horrified by what lay on the table. He'd clapped his hand over his mouth and advanced – tiptoeing for some reason – up to the body of Reuben Perkins.

  The former Shepherd of the Children of Zebulun lay in state, the lower part of his body covered by a white sheet, his head resting on a white pillow. His hands were folded across his chest. The third stroke he had suffered had killed him but the second had twisted his mouth, pulling down one corner. Death had erased this distortion and Lance saw a noble face, more like a Roman emperor than an old lag. This was his first corpse, the first he had ever seen. So this was what it was like when you were dead. The eyes were closed, the eyelids white as the rest of the face. Very tentatively he put out one finger and touched Reuben Perkins's forehead. It felt cold, more marble than skin, the texture like touching the translucent surface of one of Gemma's candles.

  A footfall in the hallway brought him back to reality. Then four people came into the room, elderly men and women he had never seen before. Uncle Gib and Mrs Perkins and another woman followed them. They crowded round the corpse, too absorbed in staring, head-shaking, and muttering what a saint the dead man had been, what a loss his death was, to notice Lance. But now was no time to speak to Uncle Gib. He slipped quietly out of the room as another group of mourners arrived, come to view the body.

  He felt rather shaken. A nasty idea had come to him that he might dream about that dead man lying on a table, his slack cold hands folded, his eyelids unnaturally white. When he closed his eyes he seemed to see that sight again, it was so different from the dead people he'd seen on telly almost every day of his life.

  He walked across the railway bridge and along Golborne Road to the canal, its waters ruffled by the cold wind into a thousand little ripples. Leaves were falling, the wind blowing them into flurries and settling them in quivering heaps. If he had kept to the towpath it would have taken him on to the southern edge of Kensal Green Cemetery, between it and the great gasworks, but he left it for Kensal Road, heading for his parents' home. He had put the dead Reuben Perkins out of his mind and was thinking about the aspirins he had bought for his mother and how, when he handed them over, she might let him stay indoors for the rest of the day, when an unmarked police car stopped and two men in plain clothes got out.

  Most members of the public would have failed to recognise them as police officers but Lance knew. He identified them for what they were as surely as if their car had been painted in red and yellow squares and they dressed in dark uniforms and chequered caps. He muttered something about having to go home and see his mum and though they didn't exactly laugh, the older one's lips twitched like he'd got some sort of tic. They got him into the car exactly the way police did on the telly, one of them holding his head down with one hand and pushing him into the back seat with the other.

  Uncle Gib was always telling him how ignorant he was but he wasn't so ignorant he didn't know they couldn't question him any more once he'd been charged. So he didn't mind being questioned yet again. It was warm in the interview room and he got cups of tea. At one point he said could he ask them something and when they didn't answer but just looked, he asked if Uncle Gib, Mr Gilbert Gibson, had told them he'd been round at his place and where to find him.

  'We ask the questions,' said the one who twitched.

  He went on denying that he'd been anywhere near Uncle Gib's house at the time of the fire. The young lady lawyer arrived and kept asking if they were going to charge Mr Platt. Because, if not, they should let him go. Lance wished she wouldn't. It only gave them ideas and that was exactly what it must have done. He knew there would be no escape and this time it was for real when he heard the words of the caution and all that stuff about things he might want to rely on in court. 'In court' made his blood run cold. It was going to be next morning, and murder and arson were the charges.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Everyone who read the Evening Standard and those who picked up a freebie in the street, read the paragraph about Lance Kevin Platt, twenty-one, of Kensal, west London, who had been charged that day with the murder of Dorian Lupescu and with setting fire to a house in Blagrove Road, West Ten. Ella read it but, because the name of the man who had applied to Eugene for his cash find had never registered with her, immediately forgot about it. Perhaps because he had seen him the day before in the Golborne Road pharmacy, Eugene remembered him and his name very well. At the same time, when telling Ella that he had only seen Lance Platt twice, he recalled that there had been a third sighting. Looking out of his bedroom window in the small hours of a morning he had seen the youth (as he had thought of him) with his characteristic backpack walking along the street in the direction of Denbigh Road. It was the night after he and Ella had been to the theatre to see St Joan. He had gone round to Elizabeth Cherry's to check that the house was secure, come back and got up later to eat a Chocorange – what else?

  Now he had a very vivid memory of thinking that Lance Platt must be up to no good. And then, immediately afterwards, telling himself that it was bad to be suspicious of someone just because he was out in the street at the time when people he thought of as law-abiding were in bed asleep. It looked as if he had been right that first time. Still, whatever Platt had been doing walking along outside his house, it was obviously unconnected with murder and arson half a mile or more away on the Kensal borders.

  Uncle Gib also read about it. His source was a giveaway newspaper called Metro and the news item brought him considerable satisfaction. It wasn't that he thought the police must be right or even that Lance had indisputably done the deeds, but rather that someone he had always disliked and disapproved of was getting his come-uppance at last. Gemma read it when she bought the Sun. She was out shopping in the Portobello Road Tesco with Abelard in the buggy and, in her own words to her mother, it gave her quite a shock. It was a crying shame, it must be a mistake. Lance hadn't been with her that night but maybe she should go along to the police station and say he had been.

  'Oh, no, you don't,' said her mother. 'You want to keep a low profile. Suppose they've got proof it was him and you've stuck your neck out. You could go inside and then what a
bout your boy? Come and give nanna a cuddle, my lambkin.'

  Fize was refitting a transformer at a house in East Acton. As he put it himself, he broke the rule of a lifetime and went down to the pub in his lunch break. It was Ian Pollitt's local and, being without a job or having the prospect of getting one, Fize knew he would be likely to find him passing his empty midday hours in the Duchess of Teck. Fize had a lager and lime, which Ian said was a woman's drink, as bad as 'lady juice', which was what they called white wine.

  'Maybe,' said Fize, 'and maybe I don't want to do my head in when we're talking about a couple of thousand volts. What d'you reckon to Lance Platt?'

  Ian tilted his head back and poured down getting on for half a pint of stout. 'Best thing that's happened to me for years.'

  'Yeah, but you know what I mean.'

  'It's not like they're going to top him,' said Ian. 'Not like they used to. What with eighty thousand banged up there's no space for him. He won't go down for no more than five or six years.'

  'He never done it,' said Fize. Now he'd bought it he no longer felt like his lager and lime and he pushed it away across the table. 'You know he never done it.'

  'I don't know nothing. My mind's a blank. Don't even know when it was.'

  'August fourteen.'

  'Is that right? Now that's funny. I was away on my holidays in Tenerife August fourteen.' Ian laughed uproariously at his joke and was still laughing when Fize left and went back to work.

  There was no bail for Lance this time. He was remanded in custody for however long it took. In his cell at the police station, stranded there until they decided where they could possibly put him until his appearance in a higher court, he took a philosophical view. Things could be worse. He'd get free meals with no effort on his part, he would no longer have to sleep in company with the bike and the car tyres. As for freedom, there wasn't much you could do with it if you'd no money.

  They had altered the design on the pack. Instead of the bold chocolate-brown-and-orange lettering and the (hideous, Eugene the connoisseur had to admit) drawing of a kind of beigecoloured lozenge with a stream of something pouring on to it, the new colours were muted, the illustration more abstract and the name changed. Chocorange was now called Oranchoco. Accumulating enough of them to keep him going on his honeymoon, Eugene thought at first, with a sinking heart, that Elixir had run out of his favourite sugar-free sweets. An assistant passing by while he was scouring the shelf both embarrassed and gratified him by telling him this was simply a name change.

  'A lot of our customers have remarked on it. But don't you worry, they're just the same. Same taste, different pack, that's all it is.'

  Eugene got out of there as fast as he could, having first bought four packs of Oranchoco and the last remaining Chocorange in the shop. Hoping, but not very confidently, that this innovation might be confined to Elixir, he visited two branches of Superdrug and the lady in the sari in Spring Street. She alone still had Chocorange. Superdrug had changed everything in the store around, putting shampoos where skin creams used to be and switching vitamins with baby-care products. Eventually he found a single packet of Oranchoco in the sweets and chocolate section, which was now where perfumes used to be. No more than six months ago he would have considered knowing the layout of a pharmacy so that he could find items in the dark beneath his dignity. How are the mighty fallen! Perhaps to be brought so low was good for his character.

  On his way back to Eugene Wren Fine Art he split open one of the new packets, took a sweet and tasted it. Whatever that shop assistant had said, it wasn't the same. There was a subtle difference and not for the better. The essence of Chocorange had been its smooth creaminess but this new one had a rough edge to the flavour, an undertaste of slight – very slight – bitterness.

  His disappointment was profound. He would get used to it, he told himself. The difference was too subtle to affect him that much. But the change made him angry for the rest of the afternoon and even angrier that something so stupid, so banal and petty, could disturb his equilibrium to this extent. A woman who had arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley would certainly have bought Priscilla Hart's Study in Precious Metals if his brusqueness hadn't driven her out of the gallery. Walking home, he tried to dismiss the whole thing from his mind but, as he struggled to do this, bitter resentment kept coming to the surface. How could they do this to him, causing him to endanger his business? How could they spoil a flavour and a texture that had been close to perfect?

  And then, what did I think about six months ago, he asked himself, before this thing took hold of me? When I look back it seems to me that I was free and that freedom I voluntarily gave up just for a taste, for something to put in my mouth. All the time he was thinking this way he was sucking an Oranchoco, unwilling to waste a precious Chocorange on something so mundane as a walk home.

  He chewed up the last of it, no better pleased with its flavour than he had been four hours before when he tasted the first one.

  Ella called out to him as he let himself into the house, 'Is that you, darling? You're nice and early.'

  His pockets were stuffed full of sweets packets. He hung up his coat, leaving the sweets where they were. She poured him a dry sherry and one for herself, taking them into the study. The warmth he so often felt when they met again after a short separation, even if that parting was no more than a matter of hours, filled him with the kind of pleasure that made him smile. She was so nice, so sweet, and she looked just the way he wanted a woman to look, pretty rather than beautiful, not thin but not plump either, a lovable woman and wonderfully intelligent.

  'What are you thinking?'

  'That I'm lucky to have you.'

  She smiled, took a sip of her sherry, passed him a dish of olives. 'There's something I want to ask you but it can wait till we've eaten.'

  'That's quite terrible,' he said, laughing. 'It makes me think you've postponed your question, whatever it is, because if you ask it I shall be put off my dinner.'

  'Oh, no, it's nothing like that. It's quite trivial, really. Let's say it's a question of our – well, our medical care after we're married. I mean, I shall go on going to Malina in the practice but you might think you could leave Dr Irving and I could look after you. Only I don't really think that's a good idea. Of course I'll still be a doctor and I'll still tell you when I think you ought to go to Dr Irving because you've got something that needs attention. Am I being too fussy, do you think?'

  'Not at all, my darling, you're absolutely right as usual.' He felt obscurely relieved, he didn't know why. 'Was that the question you're no longer putting off till after dinner? What is for dinner, by the way?'

  'Only a Thai takeaway, I'm afraid. He'll be here with it any minute.'

  He was. They ate but when Ella passed him the fruit bowl for dessert, although he took a small bunch of grapes, Eugene was aware that what he really wanted, and wanted now, was a Chocorange or even an Oranchoco. As he helped Ella clear the table – showing himself to be at least halfway to the house-husband all women seemed to want these days – he began to think of reasons for escaping from the house for ten minutes or even getting himself alone upstairs for ten minutes. That is, he tried to think of reasons but failed. Once he could have gone out to post a letter but no one sent letters any more. Replies to their wedding invitations had been the first post and the last (apart from junk mail) he and Ella had had for months. It had begun to rain, a thin drizzle misting the windowpanes.

  Dry-mouthed, a sour taste on his tongue, he went into the drawing room and put on a CD. It was a harpsichord suite of Scarlatti and it began to lull his craving, even making him wonder if, were he to play this kind of sweet Baroque music as a constant background, his addiction would gradually depart. He listened and relaxed but when Ella came in he experienced a tautening and a tensing of his whole body. And he was back to thinking, I must give it up. Now is the time, when the taste has changed, when it's no longer exactly what I want, when I'm getting married and if I give in to this cravi
ng, face a life of subterfuge and concealment and yes, lying.

  He looked up at her and saw what she was carrying. Through the glassy transparency of the plastic bag, one of those ziplock bags that could be resealed after opening, he could see the orange-andbrown lettering and the illustrations on half a dozen packs of Chocorange. The feeling he had was that which most people feel when threatened with violence. His heart began beating hard and rapidly, and his mouth dried.

  'Darling,' she said, smiling, 'how many more of these things are there in the house? I've found twenty-two but I'm sure I haven't looked everywhere.'

  He couldn't remember when he had last blushed. Perhaps not since he was a small child. He felt the hot blood rush into his face and he touched one burning cheek with the palm of his hand.

  'You mustn't be embarrassed about it and above all you mustn't think of it as an addiction. It isn't. Believe me, I do know. It's a habit and it can quite quickly be got over. I once had a patient who was the same, only with her it was mint imperials. She was eating twenty of the things every day but she was over it practically as soon as she'd told me.' She put the bag down on the table in front of him and went to sit beside him on the arm of the sofa. 'I must say you've done a very good job of hiding it. I've thought for weeks it must have been Carli who was hooked on the things. I never dreamed it might be you.'