Dark Corners: A Novel Read online

  Alone with her thoughts and feeling stronger, Lizzie sat in an armchair in the living room and wondered what would happen to the flat. It had been Stacey’s own, free of mortgage, bought with an inheritance from her parents. Stacey had been proud of her financial independence, certain she could carry on with her acting, with big parts in TV serials, once she had lost weight. Her parents had died in a car crash on the M25 when Stacey was at university. She had been staying with her aunt Yvonne Weatherspoon and her aunt’s children when the accident happened, and remained with them throughout her time at university. Lizzie wondered if she should phone Yvonne to tell her about Stacey’s death, but thought better (or worse) of it. Let the police do that. She didn’t have her number, and although she knew Stacey’s aunt slightly, she had never got on with her.

  In contrast to Stacey, Lizzie lived in a rented bedsit in Iverson Road, Kilburn. The rent was very high for what it was and the place was small, damp and in dire need of redecoration. She thought about it while she sat in Stacey’s flat, and thought too how little she wanted to return to it. Her job as a teaching assistant at a private school paid very badly, although it had its advantages. To be able to walk to work was one of them, and a free lunch was another. She wasn’t supposed to have a free lunch, or indeed any lunch at school at all, but there was no one to notice her eating from one or more of the many untouched plates she removed from the children’s cafeteria. She also ate an evening meal at her parents’ once a week, not because she wanted to, but bearing in mind – never for a moment forgetting – that her father paid half her rent. Well, her father and her mother, her mother told her she should say, though Lizzie couldn’t see why, as her mother didn’t work, or wasn’t, as she preferred to put it, a wage-earner. A breadwinner, said her father, who had been, until he retired, quite well-off.

  Lizzie was thinking rather wistfully of the shepherd’s pie and queen of puddings her mother would serve up tonight, when the doorbell rang.

  The police had arrived.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CARL HAD NEVER attended an inquest and had no intention of going to this one. That it would happen, and quite soon, loomed very large in his consciousness. He thought about it all the time, though unwillingly, because he would prefer to forget it and dismiss the whole Stacey business from his mind. If he only knew when it was, he could go away somewhere, perhaps to Brighton, or to Broadstairs, where he had once spent a week with a girlfriend. But leaving town wouldn’t help him avoid seeing a paper or watching the TV news. Besides, like everything else in his life, he couldn’t afford another trip.

  Dermot settled the matter for him. He tapped on the living room door on 1 June, the day after rent-payment day, handed over his money (a cheque this time) in the envelope, and said he was on his way to ‘the Stacey Warren inquest’. He expected he’d see Carl there, he said.

  Carl thought quickly. His nerves wouldn’t stand the idea of Dermot hearing all the evidence, even taking notes, and then coming back here and telling him in detail what had happened. He wanted to ask why Dermot was going. He had hardly known Stacey, having met her only once. Carl wanted to tell him that Stacey and her death weren’t his business; she had been his friend, not Dermot’s. But he had no reason to be rude to Dermot, especially as the month’s rent had come on time.

  ‘You mustn’t think,’ Dermot said after Carl had told him he wouldn’t be going, ‘that I’m taking time off work for this. It happens to coincide with my midday break.’ He smiled, showing the yellowish teeth. ‘A piece of luck.’

  Halfway down the path, he turned, said, ‘I’ll look in on the way back, tell you what happened.’

  He returned several hours later, and seemed to have plenty of time to spare, readily accepting the tea Carl felt constrained to offer. He settled down on the sofa Carl thought of as ‘Dad’s sofa’ with his tea and a Bourbon biscuit, and described the evidence of the doctor and the biochemist in detail.

  Dinitrophenol capsules had been lying all over Stacey’s bedroom floor, and the same substance was partially digested in her stomach and intestines. The doctor was unable to say if the dose she had recently swallowed was her first or the latest of many. Dinitrophenol – or DNP, as it was called, Dermot said – was known to bring about weight loss, but only if the dose was great enough. A heavy dose or series of doses raised the body temperature far above the danger level and increased the heart rate. Its side effects might be skin lesions, cataracts, damage to the heart and – here he paused – death. The coroner asked a police officer who had been present at the medical examination where this substance could be obtained, and was told it could be bought on the internet.

  ‘The coroner asked this police officer if it wasn’t against the law,’ said Dermot, ‘but he said it wasn’t and then he added, “Not yet.” Meaning it would be one day, I suppose.’

  Carl thought he shouldn’t ask but he had to know. ‘Did the coroner say anything about where Stacey got this batch of pills?’

  Dermot gave him a penetrating look. ‘I said: apparently it’s obtainable on the internet. All right if I have another biccy?’

  Carl pushed the plate in his direction.

  ‘The coroner called Stacey “this poor young woman”. He looked quite sad. He said her death should be a warning to all women who were unwise and foolish enough to put the slenderness of their figures before their health.’

  ‘I suppose the verdict was accidental death.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Dermot said. ‘My goodness, look at the time. I must be off. See you later.’

  So the coroner had assumed Stacey had bought the pills online. Everyone would assume that. While he was disappointed to have his fears about the DNP confirmed, Carl felt relieved that buying or taking the drug was not against the law, and that therefore, in selling Stacey fifty capsules of it, he had done nothing illegal.

  Nicola was due home at about six. She used the tube: Westminster to Baker Street, then changed on to the Bakerloo line for Maida Vale. Dermot walked from the veterinary practice in Sutherland Avenue, and this evening he arrived before she did. He was in Carl’s living room, and the door was open so there was no avoiding him. He was carrying a large carrot cake in a box.

  ‘Eating all Carl’s biscuits the way I did this afternoon, I thought I owed you this.’

  ‘Oh, well, thanks.’

  ‘I’ll just have a tiny piece and then I’ll leave you in peace. Sorry, didn’t mean to make a pun.’ Dermot cut himself a generous slice. Addressing Nicola as Miss Townsend, he said he supposed she wouldn’t approve of biscuits and rich cake.

  She looked doubtfully at him. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, working at the Department of Health like you do.’

  How did he know where she worked? she wondered. Strange. She smiled her ‘beautiful Nicola’ smile, with a radiant brightness that illuminated the whole of her pretty face. Fortunately Dermot McKinnon could not see beneath the smile to what she was really thinking.

  Carl and Dermot were in a café in the Edgware Road, seated at a table covered in animal-print plastic. Dermot had ordered two cappuccinos without asking Carl what he wanted. Carl didn’t protest. He was wondering what Dermot’s motive in following him in here might be. Silence fell, broken by Dermot asking, while running his fingers across the leopards’ spots, if Carl had read in the papers that visitors to zoos shouldn’t wear animal-skin prints because they caused excitement inside the cages. Carl hadn’t read about it and wasn’t interested. The cappuccino, which he had never tasted before, was rich and thick and not much like coffee.

  ‘If I remember rightly,’ said Dermot, ‘there was some of that DNP stuff that Stacey Warren took among your dad’s medicaments.’

  An odd word, Carl thought. Medicaments. ‘Was there?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t know what it was?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Carl. He wanted to tell Dermot that he had some nerve, snooping about.

  ‘If you’ve still got it, you ought to throw it away, you kn
ow. I expect there’ll be a big story in the papers tomorrow. I expect it will be all about how people shouldn’t use DNP and how it ought to be banned. I mean, the law ought to be changed, with a heavy penalty for anyone who gives it to – well, to someone else.’

  There was indeed a big story the next day. It was on the front page of the Daily Mail, with a glamour photo of Stacey and a picture underneath of yellow capsules in a glass jar labelled DNP.

  Carl saw the Mail on the rack outside a newsagent. He initially wasn’t going to buy it and walked away, then went back when he feared perhaps he might regret not doing so. He read the story as he walked along. One of the things it said was that as a result of Stacey’s death from ‘DNP poisoning’, dinitrophenol would soon be banned, which could happen without a new law but through something called an ‘order’.

  ‘You shouldn’t believe stuff you read in the paper,’ Carl said to himself, and from the stare a passing woman gave him, he realised he had said it aloud.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LIZZIE MILSOM KEPT hold of Stacey’s keys, both sets. No one seemed to know she had them. The police were not long in Stacey’s flat, and when they had finally gone, three days after the discovery of the body, Lizzie let herself in once more and walked round the rooms, examining pieces of furniture and equipment, looking at the lovely prints of tropical birds that adorned the walls and confirming that all Stacey’s possessions were a lot nicer than anything she had. If she lived here, she wouldn’t have to convince herself of her power by borrowing little knick-knacks. She would be powerful already, and confident.

  Someone must now be the owner of the flat in Pinetree Court, Lizzie thought, but surely Stacey hadn’t left it to anyone? People of twenty-four didn’t make wills. It would probably go to her Aunt Yvonne, or a cousin, or even someone who had never heard of Stacey. Lizzie thought she would stay a while, perhaps a few days. No one could get in, she was sure of that, for Stacey had told her there were only two sets of keys: the set Stacey carried in her handbag, and those that were in the outside cupboard. It was possible the concierge had a set, but she wouldn’t worry about that.

  Lizzie knew she must be careful that no light in the flat was visible from the street below or the car park at the back. The bedroom and bathroom windows looked down on to a kind of tree-shaded yard whose purpose was unclear. The living room was more of a problem, as it fronted on to Primrose Hill Road, but the blinds could be pulled down to cover the window and the curtains drawn to make doubly sure. It was June now, and light till nearly ten, so Lizzie felt pleased with her solution to the problem. She would change and go out, taking both sets of keys with her. It was a pity Stacey had been so overweight – conditioning had made Lizzie never use the word ‘fat’ – as her clothes would no doubt be a size 16. Yet there Lizzie was only half right, for investigating the left-hand side of the wardrobe as well as the right, she found that ever-hopeful Stacey had kept all or most of the clothes she had worn in her slim days.

  Lizzie and Stacey had been the same size in those days, a 10. Lizzie was still a 10. She hunted enjoyably through the clothes and finally laid out on Stacey’s bed a jade-green jacket, a very short jade-green skirt and a green and pink top studded with tiny pink pearls. Why not have a bath before getting dressed? Stacey’s bath was snow white, wide and deep, a seemingly inexhaustible flood of hot water flowing into it. At home in Kilburn, Lizzie had to rely on a feeble shower that was inclined to splutter, cough and sometimes stop altogether. Soaking in the hot water to which she had added nearly half a bottle of Jo Malone nectarine blossom bath oil, she thought how nice it would be to luxuriate like this every day. Stacey’s towels were not towels but bath sheets. Lizzie wrapped herself in one of them, and, having sprayed herself with nectarine scent and dressed in the green ensemble, decided to leave her face fashionably free of make-up. Turning off the lights, she went down in the lift. It was a pleasant summer day, mild and windless. She got into the tube at Swiss Cottage and went the four stops to Willesden Green.

  ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ said her mother when she opened the door. ‘Is it new?’

  Lizzie said it was, not exactly a lie. The outfit was new to her.

  Her parents’ house was one of the few in Mamhead Drive not divided into flats. Because it was big, with a large garden, Lizzie had always been proud of it without wanting to go on living there after she came down from university. Tom and Dot Milsom had bought it in 1982 for what Tom now called a derisory sum, and stayed there with no intention of ever moving. Lizzie wandered into the enormous living room, pursued by her mother with cups of tea and cakes on a tray.

  ‘Dad out on a bus?’

  ‘Gone down south today,’ said Dot. ‘Having a look at some houses in Barnes, he said. I hope he’s not thinking of moving.’

  ‘You know he never gets off the bus except to come back,’ said Lizzie, thinking of Stacey and refusing a cake her mother called a ‘millionaire’s macaroon’. She smoothed the silky stuff of which Stacey’s skirt was made and asked her mother what she thought of the tragedy in Pinetree Court.

  When he retired at the age of sixty-five – as he put it himself, quite a successful man in a small way – Tom Milsom had never been on a bus. With one assistant, later his partner, he ran a business in commercial photography from a shop in Willesden he referred to as an office. It was so near his home in Mamhead Drive that he could walk to work, and when he was called out on a job, for a wedding photo, for instance, or – something of a comedown, this – platters of chicken tikka and lamb biryani for an Indian restaurant chain, he drove there in the elderly silver Jaguar he kept in pristine condition. His photographic equipment he carried with him in the car, and very occasionally, when it needed servicing or a minor repair, he took his camera and adjuncts on the tube. Going on a bus he never even considered. But when the free bus pass for those over sixty came in, without actually using it he thought it a waste not to. So he put it in his pocket and forgot it.

  Traffic in central London, traffic anywhere in London, had become what Dot called, using one of her favourite expressions, ‘a nightmare’. And there was nowhere to park except on the residents’ parking in Mamhead Drive or Dartmouth Place where people didn’t need to park because they had garages of their own. ‘Gold dust’ in London, as Dot put it.

  Like many men of his age, Tom thought that when he retired, he would find enforced leisure wonderful. He would be free, he would be on a perpetual holiday. What had slipped his mind was how, on the holidays he and Dot had taken over the years, he had been bored stiff trudging along the narrow back streets of little Spanish towns or going on conducted tours to ruined temples in Sicily or trailing up wooded hills in Turkey for the sole purpose of looking at the view from the top. Dot hadn’t been bored, or at least had never said she was – but then nor had he said so. She said it was a lovely change from the housework. Tom had no hobbies. He knew nothing about golf; he didn’t even watch it on TV. He didn’t care for the cinema, which had nothing on it you couldn’t get on telly. He had never been much of a reader and had never learned to like classical music. Looking back to those holidays, what he mostly remembered was how slowly the time passed; that when he looked secretly at his watch, thinking it must be eleven thirty by now, he saw it was just ten past ten.

  Again like most men, unless they were accompanying a woman, he seldom if ever went to Oxford Street. Dot, who wanted him out of the way one day while she turned out the living room, suggested he go out and buy himself some socks. Possible shops in Willesden she dismissed. Why not go to Oxford Street, where Marks and Spencer – which she, like the rest of the country, called M&S – had their flagship store?

  ‘Go in the car,’ she said. ‘It won’t take you more than half an hour there and back.’

  As if saving time was one of his priorities. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you were a driver.’

  Instead of the car, he took the tube, Willesden Green to Bond Street on the Jubilee Line. On a Tuesday morning, Oxford Street wasn
’t crowded. He bought his socks and walked back towards Bond Street station. If half empty of people, Oxford Street carried a load of buses, so many that Tom fancied their weight would be too much for the road surface and any minute it would crack and sink under this scarlet mass of metal. Where did they all go to? Or come from? Why did they come here, queuing up like animals in a line heading for a water hole? He paused at a bus stop and saw that many buses, six and more if you counted the night ones, were scheduled to stop here. The first on the list was a number 6. He was standing in front of the timetable, which was on a pole and encased in glass, wuhen a bus came looming out of nowhere and bearing down on the bus stop, its light on. The number 6 was on the front of it, and so was its destination: Willesden.

  That was the beginning of it, the start of his new occupation. He refused to call it a hobby. Climbing aboard, he waved his pass at the driver, who mimed a touching of this card in a plastic case on to a round yellow disc that squeaked when contact was made. It was easy, it was rather nice. He got a seat near the front and settled down to be driven home for the first time since he’d come to live in Willesden Green.

  That was a year ago, and in that year he had ridden at least half of London’s buses, been everywhere and become an expert. This afternoon he was coming back from Barnes and in the Marylebone Road had changed on to his favourite number 6. A most interesting afternoon it had been, and outside the sun had come out brilliantly.

  Most parents would be delighted to come home and find their grown-up daughter paying an unsolicited visit. Dot evidently was, plying this vision in jade green and rose pink with cups of tea, plates of cakes and now something that was obviously a gin and tonic. Since her late teens, when Tom had expected Lizzie to change, to grow up and behave, he had viewed his daughter with a sinking heart, only briefly pleased when she got into what she called ‘uni’. But her degree in media studies was the lowest grade possible while still remaining a BA. Gradually, as she moved from one pathetic job to another, ending up with the one she had now – teaching assistant, alternating with playground supervisor of after-school five-year-olds killing time until a parent came to collect them – he felt for his daughter what no father should feel: a kind of sorrowful contempt. He had sometimes heard parents say of their child that they loved her but didn’t like her, and wondered at this attitude. He no longer wondered; he knew. Walking into the house in Mamhead Drive, he asked himself what lie she would tell that evening, and how many justifications for her behaviour she would trot out.