All Bones and Lies (6 page)

She put the phone down and her eyes were gleaming.

He shook his head in wonder. ‘I expect your performance was even better than hers.'

For a moment, his mother looked baffled. ‘Whose?' Then wires touched. ‘Oh, you mean
Perdita
.' She tossed her head in what he realized, but for her corded, sagging neck and sunken face, would have been rather a flirtatious manner. ‘And why not, Colin? After all, what is there left for me at my age, except bones and lies?'

HALFWAY THROUGH THURSDAY
morning Clarrie turned from the relentlessly flashing telephone and told him, ‘That sister of yours is downstairs. Wants to have a word.'

‘Oh,
Christ
!' He was up to his elbows in messages about the Lees and the Haksars. ‘Tell her—' But then he saw that, not for the first time, the freshly glossed fingernail had landed on Speaker, not on Secrecy, and, in his panic at Clarrie's blunder, he unintentionally compounded his own. ‘Oh,
bugger
!'

He hurried down to find Dilys wiping the floor with Arif from Accounts about the errors in her direct debits. Hastily he steered her away. ‘You can do all this by post, you know.'

‘Don't think I haven't tried. Four times. If Tor Bank ran this way, we'd have no customers.'

Thinking to placate her, he offered, ‘Cup of coffee?'

‘Not here, thanks. No.'

Still fearing that she might have overheard his howls of horror earlier, he led her next door to The Little Bakery, and, in a misguided stab at being companionable, allowed her to buy him one of their notoriously indigestible cakes.
To stop her nagging him to eat it, he tried to distract her with an update on their mother's ongoing War of the Windchimes; but, unnerved by the steady drumming of her fingers on the small table top, he soon dried up and switched to the tale of the insurance.

At once, Dilys was entranced. ‘You're
joking
. Only
that
? For Holly House! Why, these days you'd need that sort of coverage for a chicken coop!'

‘Maybe that's what she told them it was. I must say, I'm astonished that no one's ever come round to check.'

She waved her last forkful of cake. ‘No reason why they should. No skin off their nose, after all.'

She ought to know. Her bank seemed to dabble in everything. ‘But I thought all these things were index-linked.'

‘Mostly they are. But if she signed on some time back in the stone age, she could have been hugely under-insured before all that started.'

‘It's all fixed now,' he assured her. ‘I posted the confirmation myself.'

‘What should
I
care?' said Dilys, sounding so like their mother that he was, first startled, then deeply irritated. He'd really won the mad goat in the raffle, hadn't he? All right for these two to chirrup their unconcern, practically in concert. Neither had that much to lose. Dilys was already out of things – was even by now, in all probability, struck from the will. And he sensed that his mother was quite far enough along the track of not caring much about anything any more to be ready to act helpless the moment it suited. But
someone
had to take responsibility. For him, there was no choice but to keep fretting. His mother's
levels of insurance cover were not a matter for flippancy. He, after all, was the one who would have to face his conscience – and the bloody neighbours – if Norah fetched up strapped to a chair, drugged stupid in front of a blaring telly, simply because her savings had been snaffled by the council to repair her timber cladding and replace her carved casements. Easy for Dilys to sit there, smug with indifference. She hadn't spent half of yesterday facing a barrage of unpleasant innuendo. ‘Listen,' he'd said a dozen times. ‘This is absolutely nothing to do with ensuring there'll be plenty left for me to inherit.' But how could his mother turn up the chance of hovering, bent-backed, over her fading cheque book for all the world as if her only son were bullying her into paying his gambling debts, not sensibly suggesting she scale up her premiums. ‘I'll pay for it
myself,
' he told her more than once. ‘Just so long as we get it all sorted out properly.' But she was adamant. ‘No, no. I wouldn't dream of having you a penny out of pocket over some poor old lady on her last legs.' Leave it, he told himself a dozen times through the long, grinding afternoon. For once in a lifetime, be brave. Take a chance. And instantly the alternatives paraded in front of him. If he were lucky, just sleepless nights and half a heart attack each time he heard a fire engine tear past his own drab flat in the direction of West Priding. And if he weren't? A heap of rubble, years of argument with his own colleagues about possible economies in the rebuilding, and Mother living in his own back room.

It didn't bear thinking about. And mercifully he was distracted from the nightmare vision by Dilys flicking at his plate. ‘Buck up and eat, Col. We're not all council
drones with endless tea breaks. Some of us have to get back to our desks.'

At the mere mention of desks, he felt another stab of panic. To try to make a little headway on the cake front, he set his sister off on the first topic to come to mind. ‘So how is Perdita? Safely gone?'

‘Thank God! And I can't say how glad I was to see the back of her. She was so
sneaky
.'

Sneaky? That pricked his interest. After all, what could be sneakier than insinuating yourself into a strange house inside an envelope? Manfully struggling with what appeared to be, on dissolution, nothing but a mouthful of whipped oil, he was still hoping to break in with news of the curious materialization of Perdita's photograph on Mother's hall floor when his sister not only kept on as if his thoughts were perfectly audible, but also as if they were grist to her mill. ‘Do you know, the bloody woman gets
everywhere
. Last week she even fetched up on
Weekend Round-up
.'

‘I knew that,' Colin admitted.

‘How? Did you see her?'

Lamely he shook his head.

‘Well, she was
terrible
. Vain enough to get her hair done at Tatiana's, but all she did was mumble a few inanities over and over.'

Anything, even risking an argument, was better than taking another mouthful of cake. ‘Really? That doesn't sound at all like Perdita.'

Rumbled, his sister felt obliged to backtrack. ‘Well, all right, I suppose she sounded sensible enough.
If
you're as obsessed as she is with property values . . .'

Forcing words out of his mouth still held a good deal more attraction than forcing cake in. ‘I didn't know she was in property. I always thought she worked on all that arty sponsorship stuff, with you.'

‘That was only to keep her busy while they were over-staffed in Insurance Services. Now she's moved over and carving out empires in Estates.' His sister's principle of never denigrating a fellow female professional took another hard knock, Colin noticed, as she finished dismissively, ‘No, Perdita's really just a glorified estate agent now. And Marjorie says—'

‘Marjorie?'

Again Dilys tapped the side of his plate. ‘Do get a move on, Col. I haven't got all day.'

‘I'm eating as fast as I can,' he responded pettishly. ‘I do have to
chew
.' And along with this echo of the squabbles of childhood came yet another reminder of everything he'd left abandoned on his desk: the report that the youngest Haksar boy had crept over the wall to jam a wedge of carrot deep in Mr Lee's extractor fan; an account of the father's response when confronted – ‘Boys will be boys. A mere prank.' On the top of these lay a litter of irate messages passed on by Shirley at Switchboard that he'd been trying to sift into piles according to gravity: threats, punch-ups, complaints of laxatives fed to the Haksars' cat. From Colin's point of view, of course, this childish feud could not become
Vendetta!
fast enough. That, after all, would move it from its current file in Public Health into some overflowing police in-tray, and he himself could once again lean back against that great dependable stone wall, ‘I'm afraid that it's out of my
hands now. Sorry,' and get back to his report on the safety of balconies.

He had stopped listening. Surfacing temporarily from his midden of anxiety, he realized that, apart from registering the steady drip into his sister's monologue of this new woman's name – Marjorie, was it? – he'd not been following at all. So he was startled when, once again as if she'd been sitting across the cramped café table monitoring his own inner voice, Dilys finished up roundly, ‘and Marjorie agrees with me that any day now it'll be a police matter.'

He tried a bit of fishing. ‘Really? A police matter?'

‘Well, yes. You can't, after all, keep worming yourself into the houses of all your mother's elderly Canasta Club companions without a few eyebrows being raised. Sooner or later someone is bound to complain. You know how these things work. “Perdita Moran? Now where have I heard that before? Didn't some old lady phone in last week about a woman of that name practically offering to carry her off to the old folk's home?” They'll make a few inquiries, and then, because of the embarrassment, Tor Bank will have to move her back to Insurance. Or on to Home Loans, or Arrears.' She beamed with satisfaction. ‘No fat commissions there! And I won't have her back in Corporate Sponsorship. Absolutely not.' Reminded by this reference to her own little enclave, she dug in her bag. ‘Here. Invitation for Wednesday, in case we're a little thin on the ground.'

He tried not to accept it. ‘Actually, Wednesday's going to be rather diff—'

But, leaving less of a tip on the table than he would
ever have dared, she was already halfway to the door. ‘So we'll meet at the bank at seven? Then we can walk down to Stemple Street together.'

And she was gone. Mournfully he pocketed the invitation without even looking at it, and sat wondering if he dare risk the stares of other customers to wrap the remains of his cake in his napkin, so he and Tammy could feed it to Timothy Duckling.

But, as he might easily have guessed at the start, in the end he just stabbed it to death and then left it.

Did his family have nothing better to do than pester him at work? It was only next morning when Shirley tapped on the fortified screen designed to protect her from frenzied citizenry, and said accusingly through the little patch of holes drilled in the glass, ‘You've been unplugging that little machine of yours again, haven't you, Mr Riley?'

His face flared. ‘No.'

‘And don't think I haven't guessed what you've done to your mobile.'

Rain from his waterproof spattered his Slaughterhouse Inspection Rota as he pawed the ground, waiting.

At last she favoured him with the bad news. ‘I'm afraid it's your mother again.'

He couldn't help the shudder. ‘Any clues?'

‘No. She said it'll keep till you get there tonight.'

‘Tonight? I'm not going tonight.'

‘
She
thinks you are.'

Oh, God! This was a poser he could never crack. Could she really no longer be bothered to remember which
evening he'd mentioned (in which case what difference did it make, today or tomorrow, except that, being a whole day later, tomorrow really ought to be preferable)? Or was it, as he suspected, some subtle variation on the old, old theme, ‘Whatever Norah wants, she gets'? Perhaps tonight suited her better. (He must glance at the television listings and see if he could rumble her.) And though, in the past, she would have felt robust enough to come out fighting (‘No, Colin. I distinctly remember Monday was what you suggested') maybe more recently she'd decided she was too old for that kind of effort, and, as the first stage of some sort of home-based psychic retirement, had begun to take advantage of his skills at obstructing the council's cripplingly expensive state-of-the-art voicemail by leaving her more disquieting directives with the long-suffering Shirley.

Effective, either way. For as soon as the dog warden had finished grousing about the inadequacies of her new van, to Holly House is where he went.

She met him on the doorstep. ‘Devils are queuing up to spit at me, and I blame you!'

For one mad moment he reviewed his spells. But then he saw that what she was flapping at him was another of the envelopes from Frampton Commercial.

‘Oh, yes?' he said, manoeuvring past her with a few staples he'd stopped off to pick up on the way. ‘And why is that, then?'

‘This new insurance company you forced me to join—'

‘
I
didn't force you to—'

‘
Now
they want some stupid
safety
thing. This is entirely your fault. If you would only keep your nose
out of my affairs, I could get on like a house on fire.'

‘Perhaps a house on fire is why—'

‘Don't you be smart with me! If you hadn't bullied me into raising those premiums, I'd have been left in peace and quiet.'

He tried to defend himself. ‘It can't be anything to do with that. I only posted the paperwork the day before yesterday.'

‘Don't try and wriggle out of it!' She flapped the letter in his face again. ‘This is your fault!'

‘
What?
' he said, losing patience. ‘Don't
hit
me with it. Tell me what it
says
.'

‘It doesn't
say
anything. It
demands
.'

‘What?'

She wasn't wearing glasses, so her dramatic reading was for effect. ‘It demands “A Certificate of—”' Oh, how her lip curled! ‘“Approved Electrical Installation”!'

‘Really?'

Her scornful look turned personal. ‘I don't know why you, of all people, pretend to be surprised. I should have thought this sort of persecution of helpless homeowners was right up your alley.'