Heavenly Pleasures (19 page)

‘He hates Turks,’ said Selima, surprised that we didn’t know this. ‘He’s always talking about the land his family lost in the Exchange of Populations. I’ve met the rest of the Pandamus family and they don’t think like that, not even their Grandma. But George thinks that the Turks cheated them and he hates Turks. And me,’ she added. ‘He liked making me steal.’

‘What a charming young gentleman,’ said Daniel. ‘I shall have a word with George. I don’t think he’ll trouble you again. Do you have any idea about the contaminated chocolates?’

‘No,’said Selimasimply.‘Ican’timaginewhowoulddothat.’

Then she closed her eyes and abruptly fell asleep, leaning her decorated head on my shoulder. Timbo made his first and only comment for the night.

‘That was sweet,’ he said. And so it was.

When we got to Essendon Brian was already there, taking off his helmet on the porch. Mirri and her husband Adrian were waiting with a proud child carrying a brass tray of Turkish delight . When we got Selima out of the car Mirri gave a cry and embraced her.

‘My little sister!’ she sobbed. ‘Married! Come in, come in,’ she urged, and we all trooped into the house, where a pair of little girls pounced on Selima in her finery and hugged her around the knees, crying, ‘Lima! Lima!’

‘Sit down,’ ordered Mirri. She was an older version of her sister. Seeing Brian standing hesitantly in the doorway, she dragged him inside, streaming water, and hugged him. ‘Coffee,’ said Mirri firmly. ‘So you did it,’ she said to me. ‘Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ I said politely. I was so gratified. It had worked.

Then we really had to sit down and drink Turkish coffee and eat rahat lokoum while Selima was removed, stripped, dried and inserted into some of her sister’s clothes. Brian took off his leathers and was revealed as an ordinary young man in jeans. The occasion, however, was not ordinary. We had pulled off an authentic medieval rescue. We drank the coffee and became a little hilarious.

The children were delighted with Selima’s wedding finery. One put an earring into my hand and I wondered that the girl’s earlobes hadn’t been permanently stretched. It was made of solid gold and weighed accordingly. I was about to say that Selima could live for quite a while on the proceeds of her jewellery when I asked her, ‘Do you want to go back to Heavenly Pleasures?’

Selima, now clad in a dark red tracksuit, shuddered.

‘Not while George is there.’

‘Good. I will arrange a glowing reference and you can get another job. You can stay here, and your father has no power over you,’ I assured her.

‘The old bastard,’ commented Mirri. ‘If I’d known this is what he was plotting—to sell my sister—I would have strangled the old beast myself.’

‘No need,’ I said. ‘Selima? You make your own decisions now. No one else can tell you what to do. Now, we have to go. Goodnight,’ I said to Brian. ‘The same goes for you, you know.’

Brian ducked his head. ‘I know,’ he said. He looked older. More mature.

Timbo was waiting for us. We took him some Turkish delight. He scoffed it joyously all the way back to Insula. Thus in a mist of powdered sugar did we return from Young Lochinvar’s wedding. And we were all so tired that we went straight to bed.

Sunday morning dawned cold and rainy. At least the dams would be filling. I got up and made breakfast. Out of the window I saw Mrs Dawson in a bright red slicker and her Van Gogh umbrella issuing forth, presumably to go to church. No one else was stirring. I made a stack of rye bread toast, found the cherry jam, and kissed Daniel as he wandered out into the kitchen, following the life-giving Arabica scent.

We ate in silence. Horatio begged—well, firmly requested—a dab of butter. The rain scattered across the windows. I read the newspaper, remembering the crossword collective in Vertigo and wondering how anyone could be expected to know as much as the compiler required.

Then I drifted on to think of Selima and her romantic escape. She was stealing from the shop but she wasn’t sabotaging the chocolates. I decided to do a vigorous rummage amongst the inhabitants of Insula to gather some gossip. Someone must know something about the chocolate shop sisters.

Meanwhile, poor Mr Recluse was out of hospital and up there in that ruined apartment, and we probably ought to do something about him as well. Since he wasn’t a criminal or a serial killer but a person wishing to be of value to the state, he deserved our support. While we had him. I hoped the Twins had not found what they wanted from him, though if he had it, they would have located it in that devastating search.

The cherry jam went very well with the rye toast and the paper was no more distressing than usual. I hoped that Jason had managed a day without going back to his old habits. I knew where he lived but I couldn’t think of a way of checking up on him without looking like I was checking up on him. Which might be enough to drive him back on drugs because he would think that I didn’t trust him. Those visitors to the Royal Family thinking that court etiquette was tricky were on safe ground compared to me dealing with a teenaged boy.

Daniel left to talk to Viv’s old friend, and I continued with my advanced toast-study until I was interrupted by a phone call. It was Meroe.

‘Mrs Dawson has spoken to Mr White,’ she told me. ‘You know, I really find it hard to call Mrs Dawson “Sylvia”. She is going to help him clear up the mess in his apartment. Can you come too?’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring bread and cheese.’

C
_HA
PTER SIXTEEN

‘I’ll bring tea and some cleansing incense,’ said Meroe. ‘Mrs Dawson is asking some of the others as well. She told me that she would provide the champagne. I do like her,’ said Meroe. ‘Ten minutes? Oh, and the lift is working. Trudi spoke to it.’

I was very glad to hear that. I put on jeans and an old t-shirt and tied up my hair in a scarf. I assembled a basket of bread and a few cheeses. And a big jar of homemade chutney. Grandma Chapman’s Gentleman’s Relish, no finer to be found. The only difficulty in making it was standing by until it suddenly went from highly spiced vegetable stew to your actual chutney, which happened in seconds and was not a good idea to miss.

We could have a ploughman’s lunch. And I didn’t have to carry it up the stairs. I wrote Daniel a note and left it in the middle of the kitchen table, under the cat.

One thing was clear. Mr Recluse no longer had anything to hide, or he wouldn’t be allowing us into his apartment to handle everything he owned.

When I got into the lift it collected Cherie and Jon on the way up.

225

‘Kep’s still asleep,’ Jon told me. ‘He was up all night working on a virus problem from India. It’s the Pakistanis, apparently. They hate India and spend a lot of time trying to ruin their computer systems. He’ll be out for hours. He works very hard, when he works.’

‘And Dad’s making this special stew,’ said Cherie. ‘It’s got a million ingredients.’

‘What sort of stew?’ I asked. She was tying a scarf around her hair as she thought.

‘French word. Casserole? No, that’s not it.’

‘Cassoulet,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, that’s it. You have to cook a lot of duck pieces in salt first. But it tastes real good. Worth the mess. Calico is helping by eating all the bits of leftover meat. She almost got away with the duck,’ Cherie laughed. ‘She was sitting on a chair and the duck was on a tea towel which was hanging over the edge of the table. Calico just stuck a claw into the tea towel and reeled it in and the duck was moving very slowly across the table all by itself, before Dad worked out he wasn’t seeing things and grabbed it back. She was pretty pissed, but he gave her some insides. That’s the only trouble with cooking. All those heads and legs and guts and things.’

‘You must at all costs avoid eating Asian food in Asia,’ Jon told her as we got out of the lift. Mrs Dawson was already there, attired in a big cook’s smock and holding a broom in the manner made famous by the Roman legionary. She smiled on us.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘This is very nice of you. Now, Corinna and Cherie, if you please, can you begin with the kitchen, and Jon can help me stand furniture up again.’

‘Perhaps it would be better if Jon and I did the furniture,’ I suggested. ‘We’re closer in height.’

Mrs Dawson paused, making perfectly sure that I was not in any way suggesting that she wasn’t able to stand a wardrobe up by herself if necessary. I wasn’t, so she smiled and agreed.

We started in the bedroom, heaving the bed base back onto its legs and the mattress back onto the base and untangling the linen. Jon rehung three pictures which had been taken off the wall, presumably to examine the backs. This seemed like a good time to start my enquiries.

‘Do you know the ladies from the chocolate shop?’ I asked, handing him a pillow to reclothe in its case. The bedclothes must have come with the apartment. The sheets were thick Egyptian cotton and probably antique. The blankets were pure wool and the spread was a hand-pieced Amish quilt in the pattern called wedding ring. I had investigated quilting, and decided that I would need to have a neat mind and be able to sew straight seams, neither of which is amongst my accomplishments. Jon had certainly made his share of beds. His had hospital corners, which he flicked under with a knife-edged hand like a martial arts person.

‘I’ve met them,’ he said. ‘I don’t know them well. In fact, I met Vivienne in Sydney last year. Just in the crowd. But she seemed to be having a very good time.’

‘At the Mardi Gras?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I was surprised. Don’t know why I should have been. But she might have been there just for the parade, you know. Lots of straight people go to Mardi Gras. It’s a good show. You take that side of this wardrobe, Corinna. Heave on three. One, two, three.’

We stood the heavy wardrobe back up and replaced the few clothes which Mr Recluse had brought with him. Good, if boring, clothes. Three pairs of shoes. Two pairs of pyjamas. The usual underwear of the gentleman. Working together, Jon and I had transformed the bedroom from a fine imitation of Cologne Sacked by the Goths to a place where someone could

actually sleep. Nothing was broken.

They seem to have been fairly neat,’ said Jon.

‘If by neat you mean that they didn’t piss on the wall or dance on the sheets with muddy boots, I agree. They were looking for something.’

‘They surely were. Well, this is nice.’

The police must have taken the remains of the sheet with which Mr Recluse had been secured. We went into the dining room where we stood a table back on its legs, put the chairs under it, and replaced the tablecloth, the cork mats with views of London, a vase, two strange sculptures made of flat lead and plastic slugs and wire (one of which had a brass segmented fish hanging from it) and all the pebbles and shells from a dish of objets trouvés, collected circa 1920 by some bush child who had just encountered the sea.

Two glasses had been smashed and ground to powder and I went into the kitchen to find the vacuum cleaner before some
one got a cut foot. It was an old model but it whirred efficiently. There wasn’t really room for us both in the small dining room, so Jon took over and I selected my next interviewee. Meroe was ladling spilt rice into a rubbish bag.

‘Do you know the chocolate shop ladies, Meroe?’ I asked, holding the bag so that she could tip using both hands.

‘Thank you, Corinna. Terrible jangle of vibrations in here, I feel quite dizzy. Juliette and Vivienne? Not really. Neither of them were interested in the occult. They make very good chocolates, though. Reach over, if you can, and get me that dustpan? Isn’t it lucky that most of Mr White’s supplies were frozen? This rice must have been here since about 1960. Even the weevils have interbred and become extinct.’

She replaced the canister in the line on the shelf. ‘But I did see the young girl, Selima, was it? She came in and asked for a tarot reading. It was interesting.’

‘What did it say?’

Meroe looked at me with her dark, reproving eyes. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

‘Suppose I asked if it referred to anything other than her guilt at being a thief and her love for a young Asian man?’

‘Ah. No, except that she was very angry with her father. You have spoken to Selima, then? I was concerned for her. How is she?’

‘Rescued,’ I said. ‘A very dramatic escape. Very Walter Scott. And I don’t even like Walter Scott. Some of these saucepans are collector’s items,’ I said, picking up a beautifully enamelled skillet and clanging it back into its cupboard. ‘You all right in here?’

‘Yes, I’m throwing away all this stuff. The fridge, fortunately, was not unplugged, though it was searched. I’ll put the kettle on when I am done.’

‘I’ll be in the parlour.’

Mrs Dawson was replacing books in the bookcase while Mr Recluse sat on the couch, looking at a pile of cushions with ripped covers. ‘If you have a needle and thread I can cobble up those seams,’ I told him.

‘In my bag, Corinna dear,’ said Mrs Dawson. I found a darning needle and that chameleon thread and sat down on the floor. Mrs Dawson had also supplied a strong pair of dressmaking scissors and a thimble.

‘Can you talk while you are sewing?’ asked Mrs Dawson.

‘Yes,’ I said, taking up a sadly torn raw silk cushion and turning the cover inside out. I could hear the neat thud of books slotting home into their places.

‘Then perhaps you can tell me what is going on in the police investigation,’ said Mrs Dawson.

‘Not a lot,’ I said, stitching. ‘You would know as much as I do. My police person isn’t saying anything about who Mr White is or why he is here,’ I added, looking up from the seam I was making. ‘But she did put a time limit on his danger— three weeks.’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Dawson. ‘How annoying.’

‘In return, can I ask a question?’ I put down the mended cover, reunited it with its cushion, and handed it to Mr White. He still hadn’t said a word.

‘Certainly.’ Mrs Dawson finished with the books, levered herself to her feet, and began to replace ornaments on the mantlepiece. The blown-open safe was ruined, revealed against the far wall of the parlour behind a big picture of remote brown moorlands with a brown stag and a brown sky. I took up another ripped cushion. This one was blue Thai silk.

‘Do you know anything about the ladies—no, the whole staff—in the chocolate shop?’

‘Juliette is a sweet child with a thin streak of anger somewhere inside her—one feels these things. Vivienne is a strong-minded woman prone to moods, possibly hormonal. George is an insolent brat who will come to a very bad end, if I’m any judge. And he will deserve it. Selima is a downtrodden girl who might do almost anything if pushed far enough.’

Now that was a bundle of news. Mrs Dawson was a very acute observer. I reminded myself not to take her lightly—not that I ever had.

‘Selima ran away, but she’s safe now. It was a very impressive rescue. Of the four, who would you say would be likely to sabotage the chocolates?’

‘None of them,’ said Mrs Dawson decisively, righting a terracotta statue of the Infant Samuel Before Eli and clearly regretting that it hadn’t been broken. ‘Juliette and Vivienne need each other. George is a bad-mannered narcissist but he needs his job. So does Selima.’

‘I came to the same conclusion,’ I said sadly, fixing another cushion and reaching for the third. Mrs Dawson picked up glasses from the lounge chair and dusted each one before she put them on a silver tray much in need of a good polish.

‘I believe these are Venetian glass,’ she said. ‘Not one broken. Remarkable. Daniel?’ she called. ‘How are you getting on with the bath?’

‘I think I’ve got all the glass out of it,’ said Daniel, who must have removed Horatio from the table and found my note. He had come in without my hearing him. ‘I’ll just do a last run-over with a piece of Blu-Tack and that should do it. Luckily it was a fairly thick tooth glass, not a fine champagne glass.’

‘Then Mr White can have the bath he so desperately wants, and we shall prepare luncheon,’ decided Mrs Dawson. Jon gave Mr White a bath towel and his slippers and Daniel yielded him the bathroom. Mr White plodded inside and shut the door.

‘Chatty man, isn’t he?’ I said. Mr White made me really uneasy.

‘He was in shock, so they gave him a sedative in hospital,’ said Mrs Dawson. ‘It hasn’t worn off yet. Jon, can you open the champagne? I think we all need a drink.’

‘First we cleanse the violence and fear,’ said Meroe. Kylie and Goss, clearly by arrangement, came in at this point. They set up a lot of candles at different points of the room and chanted while Meroe lit her incense and opened windows. Daniel, Jon, Mrs Dawson and I stood in the middle of the room. I swear some of the nervous energy that had been making me jittery seemed to lift or be soothed. The incense smelt of Orthodox churches. Meroe put on a CD of sweet, soft music. I drew a deep breath. So did Jon. He, of course, is more used to this sort of thing than I am. Daniel took my hand. His hand was cold. Mrs Dawson preserved her social smile, as I was sure she could do through tidal wave, earthquake, nuclear attack, or someone using the salad fork for their fish course. They made hostesses tough in the old days.

‘Thank you, dear, very effective,’ was all she said when Meroe had concluded, blown out her candles, and dismissed her handmaidens. Jon opened the bottle of champagne and we all drank out of the Venetian glasses, which were tinged faintly green and so thin that I was afraid I might bite a piece out of the rim. As should have been expected, it was very good champagne.

Then Meroe and I went to assemble lunch. The apartment really did feel different. It also smelled very nice. We had lovely things to eat. Meroe’s organic leaves and herbs, the last of the cherry tomatoes, baby cucumbers, three different cheeses, four different sorts of bread and the Gentleman’s Relish. Meroe had managed to save the salt. We made a salad dressing from her superlative herbal vinegar and cold pressed virgin olive oil, and found that there were enough plates, bowls and cutlery to supply an array with a five course dinner. I sliced busily with one of those invaluable breadknives which have been in the kitchen for decades and are sharpened to a streak.

‘This looks like lunch,’ I said, piling the leaves into a Chelsea salad bowl which was probably worth the purchase price of Earthly Delights. Meroe gave me a strange look.

‘It is lunch, no?’ she asked.

We announced to the bubbly-bibbers that they should come and serve themselves as there wasn’t enough room for us all to be seated at the table. I selected seed bread, blue cheese and salad and took the couch, where Daniel and Jon joined me. Mrs Dawson and Meroe sat down at the table.

We could hear extensive splashing from the bathroom. A damp but clean Mr Recluse emerged, padded into his bedroom, and came out clothed and in his right mind. He took Mrs Dawson’s hand.

‘I can’t believe that you did all this for me,’ he said to her. He had a nice voice, quite deep. An Australian accent.

‘Nonsense, dear boy,’ she said briskly. ‘Do get yourself some lunch and join me at the table. These dissolute creatures are used to eating from plates on their knees but I haven’t got the knack.’

The dissolute creatures grinned and stuffed their faces. I went back for some pasta douro, cheddar and Gentleman’s Relish and found that it was just as good as I remembered. I was hungry and the food was vanishing fast.

‘Now,’ said Mrs Dawson to Daniel. ‘Tell us the tale of how Corinna contrived Selima’s escape.’