The Rottweiler (v5) Page 8

  CHAPTER 6

  As the weekend approached Becky’s thoughts turned to Will and the question of inviting him over for the Saturday or the Sunday. She hadn’t spoken to him since she left him with Inez on the previous Friday evening and now her usual guilt was building up. But something unusual these days had happened to Becky on the previous Sunday. She had met a man.

  It was at the home of someone she worked with who had asked her to dinner, and the invitation had seemed to come out of the blue. She had been caught and having just remarked that she had nothing particular to do on the day in question, had to say yes. The man was her hostess’s cousin. He was about Becky’s own age, good-looking, nice and newly divorced. Because it was dark when she left and her car was necessarily parked a couple of hundred yards up the street, James came out with her and escorted her to it. As he saw her into the driving seat, he asked if he could take her out to dinner the following Friday or Saturday. Becky said yes without much hesitation but her yes was to Friday, for she was already wondering which weekend day she would be obliged to invite Will.

  James had phoned her and been just as charming. He only wanted to hear her voice, he said, and have five minutes’ chat if she could spare the time. The five minutes were extended to twenty and by the time Becky rang off she was starting to think that if Friday evening was as successful as it promised to be he might want to spend Saturday with her and she might want to spend Saturday with him. She hadn’t been so attracted to anyone in years and she thought he felt the same about her. So should she wait and see or go ahead and invite Will for the Sunday?

  And if he wanted Sunday with her too? If she said, yes but my nephew is coming and he said that was all right, he could meet her nephew, what then? Dreadful feelings came to the surface of Becky’s mind, feelings of which she was deeply ashamed. She didn’t want James encountering Will who was such a near relation but was a builder’s labourer and—well, not quite, oh, God, how to put it without making herself the vilest kind of rat?

  Yet weekends never went by without her inviting him. Suddenly she thought of the girl called Kim. Maybe it was possible that Will and she had been out together every evening, that because of this Will wouldn’t want to spare a day for her. No one, not the God she didn’t believe in, no human judge, could surely expect her to devote what free time she had to her dead sister’s child, a grown man, with a job and friends and a life of his own. No one. Of course, she told herself, it wasn’t quite like that. It looked that way on the face of it but because it wasn’t a general condition but a case of individuals, the ordinary rules didn’t apply. If her conscience, that inner voice, that old-fashioned concept, kept telling her to invite him she should obey. If James really liked her he would come back and not be put off by a reasonable refusal. That, she knew, was the advice the agony aunt she never wrote to but often thought of writing to would give her.

  Why was it that these columnists’ recommendations were never appealing and only persuaded one to choose the alternative instead?

  While most people, without home duties or children, who go to see a film simply look up the times of showings and go, for Will careful preparation was required. How to find out when to go, for instance, to eat before or after or during and what to eat, what means of transport to use. Like a child, he seldom had to make decisions or assume responsibility. Others, Becky, the children’s home and his social worker friend Monty, and Inez, and Keith, did those things for him. Even Kim had supplied a van to drive him to the cinema last time. Now he was on his own, which a psychiatrist would probably have said was good for him.

  The Treasure of Sixth Avenue was still on at the Warner Village. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that it might not be and he went past it on the bus going up the Finchley Road, not with the purpose of checking but to practise getting on to the bus and buying a ticket and making sure it was going in the right direction. In a newspaper cinema guide Inez found the times of showings for him. He was comfortable with figures, and he found it easier to hold two fifty, six twenty (the time he had gone with Kim) and eight thirty-five in his head than reading this information would have been. More difficult was to decide when to go. If he chose the first showing it would have to be on a Saturday or Sunday, and one of those days he was sure to be asked to Becky’s. The idea of refusing Becky a second time alarmed him, for the result might be that she stopped loving him, and her love was the most important thing in his world.

  Eight thirty-five was very late, and strongly present in Will’s code of conduct was a rule of the children’s home, enforced by Monty, that its occupants had to be in bed by ten thirty. That evening at Inez’s he had stayed up until twenty to eleven because he had been enjoying himself so much but he wasn’t anxious to repeat this late retirement. Then there was the question of his evening meal. He always had it at seven but if he went at the time he had gone with Kim he would be in the cinema at seven. At half past five he wouldn’t be hungry enough and at nine, the time he might get home if the first bus came and the bus he had to change on to came, it would be too late. Eight fifteen, which was the time he had eaten with Kim, had been possible but he was nervous about going into any of those cafés alone.

  His head swam when he confronted the difficulties and he very much wanted someone else to take this load off his shoulders. Becky could be that someone else but to ask her would mean phoning her; receiving calls he could manage but he had never yet made one. Of course, she would phone him. She would have to in order to invite him for Saturday or Sunday and then he would ask her. He would just ask her which showing to go to and when he should eat. Maybe she would say, ‘You come over here on Sunday this week, Will, so you can go and see your film on Saturday afternoon at two fifty.’ Instead she might even say, ‘You come over here on Saturday and then you can go and see your film on Sunday afternoon.’

  She might want to come with him on the afternoon he didn’t go to her. That would be lovely, as being with Becky always was, but there was a difficulty. Once she too knew about the treasure she might want to help him look for it and then it wouldn’t be a surprise when he told her about the money and the house. Surprising Becky and seeing her delight was nearly as important to Will as the treasure itself.

  So many customers came into the shop on Thursday morning and again in the afternoon that it was after four when Zeinab had the chance to tell Inez her news.

  ‘I didn’t think that woman was ever going to make up her mind about silver teaspoons, did you? You’d think they were platinum the way she went on. And talking of platinum, what d’you reckon to my engagement ring? Morton gave it me at lunch. A perfect fit. He says he knows the measurements of my darling little fingers, his words not mine, like they was his own. More like a bunch of bananas, yours are, I said.’

  Inez admired the ring in which a solitaire diamond the size of Zeinab’s thumbnail was set. ‘But aren’t you already engaged to Rowley Woodhouse?’

  ‘Sort of. But they don’t know each other, don’t know the other one exists, there’s no risk.’

  Inez could barely repress her laughter. ‘Are you going to marry them both?’

  ‘Frankly, Inez, and this is between you and I, I’m not planning on marrying no one. D’you know what Rowley said to me, he’s very clever. “Sweetheart,” he said, “engagement is the modern marriage.”’

  ‘Yes, and the law isn’t going to punish you if you’ve got two fiancés. But what’s your father going to say if you bring home two different men you’re engaged to?’

  ‘I’d never take them home.’ Zeinab sounded quite shocked. ‘My dad reckons I’m going to marry his cousin’s son in Pakistan. I didn’t tell you, did I, about this bloke Morton introduced me too last evening? He’s called Orville Pereira, nothing to look at, ugly as sin and God knows how old but Morton told me he’s making thirty grand a week. A week.’

  Inez shook her head. Often she didn’t know what to make of Zeinab.

  ‘There’s Will getting out of Keith Beatty’s van. He’s
been very preoccupied lately, lost in a dream.’

  But Zeinab wasn’t interested in Will Cobbett. ‘I’ll wait till that Keith’s taken himself off and then I’ll just pop round the corner for the evening paper.’

  ‘See if they’ve found Jacky Miller yet. There was nothing on the one o’clock news.’

  While she was gone Inez set about tidying up the shop. Every box and case of silverware they had lay open on tables, the top of the spinet and various plant stands. She was closing the lid of the last one when Freddy Perfect and Ludmila Gogol came in by the street door. Inez hated that. In her own phrase, it made her hackles rise. There was a door at the foot of the stairs for the tenants—why couldn’t they use that?

  Ludmila was dressed today in an antique floor-length dress of figured pink velvet that hadn’t come from Star Antiques but from some emporium in the Portobello Road, as its wearer proceeded to tell her. In the accent of the steppes, or something approximating to it, Ludmila said that though she had paid only fourteen ninety-nine, the dress was worth at least a hundred pounds. She took a cigarette from the handbag she carried and called a reticule, inserted it in a black and silver holder, lit it and blew a perfect smoke ring. Freddy was at his usual pursuit of picking up and examining small artefacts.

  ‘Excuse me, Ludmila,’ said Inez, unable to contain herself any longer and torn between the two complaints she had to make. ‘I don’t allow smoking in here. It’s a rule, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, but I am resident. Freddy, now he is different, he is not resident but only my lover, he is not living here.’

  ‘Really? You could have fooled me. And another thing, haven’t I seen that cigarette holder somewhere before? In this shop, for instance?’

  Zeinab came back but Inez didn’t let her arrival stop her. ‘I am quite sure I didn’t sell it to you, and nor did Zeinab.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  With a continental shrug and a half-smile, Ludmila removed the still-alight cigarette and put it in her mouth. As if by magic it adhered to her lower lip while she talked, bobbing up and down. ‘Oh, I am so sorry. Freddy is culprit, Freddy is naughty boy. He is so in love with me, you know, that he want to buy me gifts all the time but he has no money. What would you? I tell you, he borrow this from your shop. Just for a day or two—that is right, Freddy?’

  ‘Didn’t hear a word,’ said Freddy, who had been totally absorbed in tugging at a chain which varied the levels of light, dim, normal and very bright, obtainable from a brass table lamp. ‘Tell me again.’

  She did, word for word, smiling ruefully and holding out the cigarette holder to Inez. With a snort, Zeinab snatched it, cleaned the bowl on a tissue and put it on the spinet top alongside an egg which was a Fabergé copy and a pair of minute ballet shoes. ‘They’ve identified that Nottingham girl,’ she said to Inez. ‘That headline’s a disgrace, don’t you reckon? They don’t care what they put in the paper.’

  “Waste Dump Girl was in Vice Trade,” Inez read. ‘It does seem a bit hard on the people close to her. Her name was Gaynor Ray and the place they found her was a stone’s throw from where she lived with her boyfriend.’

  ‘Depends how far you can throw a stone. Rowley was the Greater London champion of putting the shot a couple of years back. He could throw it half a mile.’

  ‘There’s a lot here about what her mother said. She doesn’t seem to have had a father. And—oh, they’re tying this one in with the Rottweiler’s murders.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Zeinab appeared to have read the whole story on her way back from the newsagent’s. ‘She was garrotted and that’s not what you’d call a common sort of murder, is it? Her bag was beside her under all that muck and a carrier bag she must have been carrying with food in it. Yuck, it makes you feel like throwing up.’

  ‘I wonder what he took. I mean, what was the small object?’

  ‘If he was doing that then. Mind you, I reckon he was. I reckon he lived in Nottingham and probably killed a lot of girls, only they haven’t found them yet. They’ll all come to light. There was a man in Russia killed more than fifty people. I saw that in a book somewhere.’

  ‘In Russia are many terrible things,’ said Ludmila, accepting a star fruit from the packet Freddy held out to her, presumably in lieu of the cigarette, which Inez had stubbed out when it was left for a moment on a Wedgwood ashtray. ‘All things that happen in Russia bigger and worse than all other places. Me, I know, I am born in Omsk.’

  Last time Russia had been mentioned in conversation she had named Kharkov as her birthplace. Still, Inez didn’t expect anything but fantasies from Ludmila. Fleetingly, she thought of Jeremy Quick, but produced one of the formulas she used to Freddy in the mornings. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to get on.’

  Taking at least five minutes about it, the two of them drifted to the interior door. Impatiently, Inez watched them go. ‘I wonder how many other unconsidered trifles she’s picked up,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t Freddy.’

  ‘You want to chain everything down when she’s around. It says here that poor girl has been dead at least a year. She looks nice in that picture, quite attractive, not much like that when they found her, I bet.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Inez.

  Babysitting was something Mrs Sharif would never have considered doing if it hadn’t been for a television set even larger and more versatile than her own, the stack of videos, the Marks and Spencer’s Chicken Tikka in the fridge and the Godiva chocolates on the table. All these goodies made waddling the two hundred yards from her home to Dame Shirley Porter House a pleasure rather than a chore—or at any rate a bearable means to an epicurean end. She often dropped in during the afternoon as well and settled down for a chat with Algy over one of the creamy, grated-chocolate-topped cappuccinos he made her.

  Reem Sharif had never been married. The ‘Mrs’ was a courtesy title she had awarded herself after the fashion once established by unmarried cooks in the houses of the gentry. In her own phrase, Zeinab’s father had ‘buggered off’ as soon as she told him of her pregnancy. He had been a very good-looking white man called Ron Bocking but always referred to by her as ‘the Rat’ or ‘the scum of the earth’. Reem had also been good-looking and now at only forty-five would have been so still but for the mountains of fat which had engulfed her. Much of this was due to her having made up her mind, as soon as Zeinab went to school, that insofar as she could, she was never again going to do anything she didn’t like and as much as possible of what she did.

  So she had given up work in the bra and pants-producing sweatshop in Brentford and psyched herself into developing a bad back. Doctors can do little about back pain, either in diagnosis or amelioration. They can’t prove you have it or don’t have it, but they assume you do if you stoop and groan. Reem was a good actress. She stooped and groaned with the best of them, and occasionally managed an artistic flinch and gasp when a twinge grabbed her. Incapacity Benefit amounts to much more than ordinary Social Security Benefit and Reem, who had nothing else to do but study the forms and concentrate her mind on the pamphlets, secured for herself every possible extra. Her local authority paid the rent of her flat and had agreed to supply her with a wheelchair. At present, alone with Carmel and Bryn, Zeinab and Algy having gone to the pictures, she was giving this offer her serious consideration and wondering if she wouldn’t prefer a car. She couldn’t drive but she could learn …

  ‘Can we have a video, Nanna?’ said Carmel. ‘We’d like Basic Instinct.’

  Their father banned it along with Reservoir Dogs and The Shawshank Redemption but Reem didn’t care. She always let the children do exactly as they liked so long as they didn’t bother her and they loved her for it.

  ‘Bryn have a choc.’ The little boy did his baby talk act whenever he wanted anything. ‘White choc, not brown,’ he shouted as the wrong kind was produced.

  ‘Go on, help yourself, and shut up,’ said Reem, pushing the box towards him. It was time for her curry, anyway. Many years had passed
since she had cooked anything. She lived on Indian takeaway from the Banyan Tree, eating the previous evening’s tikka or korma leftovers for breakfast, followed by a Mars bar, a meal she took when she got up at midday. A strict upbringing by devout Moslem parents in Walworth—they threw her out when she was pregnant—had left her with only one moral principle, an antipathy to alcohol, and she was fond of saying in a virtuous tone that she never drank anything stronger than Coke, the non-diet kind. There were about ten cans of it in the drinks and ice department of Zeinab’s enormous American fridge. She took a can and lit one of her own king-size cigarettes, Zeinab and Algy having unaccountably omitted to provide any. The Chicken Tikka heated in the micowave, she tipped it on to a plate and carried it back to her chair. Alternately taking a mouthful of food and a draw on her cigarette, she watched impassively Carmel’s highly unsuitable video choice. Bryn, his face coated in chocolate, white and brown, climbed on to her big soft lap and laid his cheek lovingly against her neck. Giving him an absent-minded one-armed hug, Reem took a swig of her Coke.

  Zeinab and Algy seated themselves in the Warner Village cinema. Thanks to Algy, as timely as Zeinab was unpunctual, they were early for the six twenty showing.

  ‘This is a stupid time to go to a film,’ grumbled Zeinab. ‘I don’t know why we couldn’t go at eight thirty-five.’

  ‘Because your mum wouldn’t come at eight, that’s why. She says she don’t fancy not getting home till midnight, she needs her sleep.’

  ‘She what? She hasn’t done a bloody stroke since nineteen eighty-one.’

  ‘The Rottweiler’s at large, she says, and if you live on an estate you’re a prime target. Specially at night. I’m only telling you what she says.’