The Lake of Darkness (11 page)

Martin didn’t expect to see Francesca again that weekend, he didn’t even really mind that, but he had somehow taken it for granted that now they would meet every evening. He was very taken aback when she phoned him on Monday morning to say she wouldn’t be able to see him that night, Lindsay had a bad cold, and perhaps they could see each other in a week’s time. He was obliged to wait, phoning her every day, very aware of that other life she led with a husband and a little child, yet scarcely able to believe in its reality.

Nothing could have brought that reality more forcefully home to him than Lindsay herself. On the first Saturday afternoon
Russell went off to football and she was able to get away she brought Lindsay with her.

“Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry. I had to bring her. If I hadn’t I couldn’t have come myself.”

She was a beautiful little girl, anyone would have thought that. She was dark like her mother but otherwise not much like her, their beauty being of two very distinct kinds. Francesca had a high colour and fine pointed features, hair that waved along its length and curled at it tips, and her eyes were brown. Lindsay’s eyes were bright blue, her skin almost olive, her mouth like the bud of a red flower, a camellia or azalea perhaps from her mother’s shop. Because her straight, almost black hair was precociously long, she looked older than she was. To Martin it seemed for a moment as if the face beside Francesca’s smiling apologetic face was that of an aggressive adolescent. And then Francesca was stripping off coat and woolly scarf and it was a baby that emerged, a walking doll not three feet high.

Lindsay ran about examining and handling the Swedish crystal. Martin’s heart was in his mouth, but he scolded himself inwardly for turning so young into an old bachelor. If he was like this now how would he be when he had children of his own, when he and Francesca had children of their own? Lindsay began turning all his books out of the bookcase and throwing them on the floor. It surprised Martin that Francesca kissed him in front of Lindsay and let him hold her hand and sat with her head on his shoulder. It surprised and slightly embarrassed him too, for Lindsay had so far only uttered one sentence, though that frequently and in a calm conversational tone.

“I want to see my daddy.”

Martin looked at Francesca to see how she took this, but even when Lindsay had repeated it at least ten times Francesca only smiled vaguely and she continued to give Martin butterfly kisses. It’s because she doesn’t mind Russell
knowing, Martin thought and he felt elated. It’s because she knows now that her marriage is over.

Then a rather curious thing happened.

Martin had been saying rather gloomily that he supposed they wouldn’t be able to meet much over Christmas.

“No, but I’ve got something nice to tell you, darling.” Francesca’s eyes sparkled. “I’ll be able to come and stay the whole New Year week-end with you-if you’d, like that.”

“If I’d, like it! It’s the most wonderful Christmas present you could give me.”

“Russell’s taking her to his parents in Cambridge for the week-end.”

Lindsay came over and climbed on her mother’s knee and put her hand over her mother’s mouth and said,

“We’ll go home now.”

Martin said, “I thought you said his parents lived in Oxford. That week we met I thought you said he had taken Lindsay to his parents in Oxford.”

Francesca opened her mouth to speak and Lindsay pinched her lips together. “We’ll go home now, we’ll go home now,” Lindsay chanted. “I want to see my daddy.”

Lifting Lindsay, Francesca stood up. “I’ll have to take her home, Martin, or we could all go for a walk. Oh, don’t do that, Lindsay, don’t be so
awful.”
She turned on Martin her direct and transparently honest gaze. “Russell’s parents live in Cambridge, Martin. I’m afraid it’s you who got it wrong. One always does associate those two places, don’t you think? That’s why you got confused.”

She wouldn’t let him drive them home but insisted on a taxi.

On Saturday, December 16, Mrs. Bhavnani and Suma flew to Sydney, and Martin, after drinks in the Flask with Norman Tremlett, did his Christmas shopping. He bought six rose bushes for his father, My Choice, Duke of Windsor, Peace, Golden Showers, and Super Star twice, Rive
Gauche eau de toilette, for his mother, a box of handkerchiefs embroidered with blue and yellow flowers for Caroline, and for the Vowchurches, who had invited him on Boxing Day, a macrame hanging plant container. Mr. Cochrane would get a ten-pound note. There was no one else to buy for except Francesca.

This was difficult. He had never seen her wear jewellery, so presumably she didn’t like it. He couldn’t buy her clothes when he didn’t know her size or perfume since he didn’t know her taste. At last he found two cut-glass scent bottles with silver stoppers in an antique shop and paid thirty pounds for them.

On Sunday he had lunch with his parents. Secretly, so that his father shouldn’t observe them, his mother showed him the current
North London Post.
The front page lead was headed “Miracle Op for Hornsey Boy,” and there was a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Bhavnani with Suma, the three of them posed, evidently several years before, in a very Victorian way in a photographer’s studio. Mrs. Bhavnani, wearing a sari, was sitting in a carved chair with the boy standing at her knees and her husband behind her.

“It’s some relative told the paper,” whispered Mrs. Urban. “Look, it says the money was raised by a customer of the shop who wants to remain anonymous.”

Martin saw that the by-line was Tim’s. It was a month now since he had seen Tim. Ought he to give him a ring and arrange to see him at Christmas?

He would be going for a drink with Norman Tremlett on Christmas Eve and to supper with Gordon and Alice Tytherton on Christmas Night. Christmas was a time when you made a point of seeing your close friends, and Tim had seemed a closer friend than either Norman or the Tythertons. Had seemed. Martin couldn’t remember that there had ever, since that encounter in the wood in May, been such a long time go by without their seeing each other. He had read somewhere that we dislike those whom we have injured,
but that seemed absurd to him. Surely we should dislike those who injure us? Perhaps both were true. Anyway, you couldn’t say he had
injured
Tim by not going to his dinner party. No, it was
he
who had taken rightful offence at Tim’s sarcasm and reproaches. So what if they had made him come to dislike Tim? Tim was a dangerous companion, anyway, and not likely to get on with Francesca.

Mr. Cochrane didn’t come on the Friday before Christmas. He phoned, waking Martin up, at five minutes to six in the morning to say his sister-in-law was about to be taken away to what he called a nursing home. He intended to go with her in the ambulance. Martin wondered if this accounted for Mrs. Cochrane’s failure to reply to his letter. Perhaps. It couldn’t, however, explain why Miss Watson hadn’t written again or phoned or why he had had no acknowledgement of his cheque from Mr. Deepdene.

The police came and talked to Finn. He was one of the last people to have seen Anne Blake alive. Her friends in Nas-sington Road had told them that. Finn said he had left the house in Modena Road at half-past four, soon after she had come in, and had driven straight home. They seemed satisfied. They seemed to believe him. Finn thought how different things might have been if one of the officers, that middle-aged detective sergeant for instance, had happened to have been involved in the investigation into Queenie’s death eleven years before. But no one connected the carpenter and electrician of Lord Arthur Road with the fifteen-year-old white-headed boy who had been in the house in Hornsey when another woman was beaten to death. Finn wasn’t frightened of the police, anyway. His fear was for his mother.

Lena’s reading glasses were ready for her within a week. By that time the Parliament Hill Fields murder had retreated to the inside pages, but Finn was afraid of some old copy of a newspaper falling into her hands. Such a one might be stuffed into the toes of a bargain pair of shoes or used to wrap a scented candle. When Lena set off for the shops, made stout by layers of coats and a lagging of stoles, a Korean straw basket in one hand and a greengrocer’s net in the other, he watched her with a pang. He couldn’t understand the impulse that had made him slaughter Anne Blake out there in the open, when he might so easily have waited till the next day and achieved an accident.

How was he going to master others and control destinies when he couldn’t yet master himself?

He had waited in daily expectation for the balance of the payment to come, for one of those olive-faced children to appear with a parcel. It was Christmas before that happened. The eldest boy brought the money wrapped in red paper with holly leaves on it and secured with silver Sello-tape. Finn’s pale glazed eyes and skeletal frame in a dirty white robe frightened him, he muttered something about Dad having had flu and now pneumonia, and fled.

Finn peeled off the red paper, not much amused by Kaiafas’ idea of a joke. Underneath, before he reached the Mr. Kipling jam tart box in which the money was packed, was an inner wrapping of newspaper, the
Daily Mirror
, November 28, with a picture of the path and the grove of trees where Anne Blake had died. Finn tore it to pieces and burnt it as he had burnt Anne Blake’s money and chequebook and credit cards.

The money was correct, two hundred and fifty ten-pound notes. No one would come robbing him, he was the last person. They were wary of him in the neighbourhood since he had roughed up those squatters for Kaiafas. Kneeling on the floor, tucking the money into a plastic carrier under his mattress, he heard Lena pass his door. She was chattering away; there was someone with her. Mrs. Gogarty maybe or old Bradley whose daughter-in-law locked him out of the house while she was at work so that he had to take refuge in the library or with Lena. Finn listened, slightly smiling. She had a host of friends. She wasn’t like him, she could love people. She had even loved Queenie …

Lena had been over forty when Finn was born. She had never supposed she would have a child and her husband was dying of Addison’s disease. The baby she named Theodore after the dead man, which he was destined never to be called except by schoolteachers. For Lena he needed
no name, speaking to him summoned a special note into her voice, and to Queenie he was always “dear.” They went to live with Queenie when Finn was six months old.

Lena couldn’t live alone with a baby. She wasn’t strong or self-reliant. Queenie was her first cousin and also a widow, a State Registered nurse who owned her own house and was fat and practical and seemingly kind.

Queenie’s house was in Middle Grove, Hornsey, one of a row of neat, narrow houses on three floors under a slate roof. Finn would have liked to sleep in Lena’s room, but Queenie said that was silly and wrong when there were four bedrooms. Lena had a small pension from Theodore Finn’s employers, but it wasn’t enough to live on and keep Finn on, so later she went out cleaning for Mrs. Urban in Copley Avenue, leaving the child at home with Queenie. It was Queenie’s aim and desire, though without intentional cruelty, without really knowing what she was doing, to win Finn’s love and make him prefer her over his mother. She knew she would be a better influence on him. She read to him out of
Thomas the Tank Engine
and gave him banana sandwiches for tea and wheeled him round the shops, and when people said “your little boy” she didn’t contradict them.

Lena observed it all with speechless anguish. There was no fight in her; she could only contemplate the theft of her son in passivity and pain. But there was nothing to contemplate, for Finn was not to be won. He wavered for a while, half-seduced by the reading and the sandwiches, and then he returned Quietly to his mother, creeping into her bedroom at night, finding his way in the dark.

When he was thirteen the poltergeists started. Lena, who was psychic, believed that they were spirits, but Finn knew better. Sometimes he could feel the energy coursing through his veins like electricity along wires, charging his muscles and raying out through his finger ends. Lena saw his aura
for the first time. It was golden-orange like the rising sun. He was aware of his brain waves, of a surplus of power.

One day all the plates in Queenie’s china cupboard rattled down off the shelves and a lot of them smashed. Another time a brick came flying through the kitchen window, and in the same hour the framed photograph of Queenie in her staff nurse’s uniform, wearing her SRN badge, fell down off the wall and the glass cracked.

Queenie said Finn was responsible, he was doing it himself, though even she couldn’t explain how he had brought into the house a rockery stone no one could lift an inch off the ground. The poltergeists went away soon after he started smoking the hashish, and when they were gone he regretted their loss bitterly, praying for their return to any god or spirit or seer he came across in his reading. But they had deserted him. He decided to kill Queenie.

There were a number of reasons for this. He was afraid of her mockery and alarmed at her distaste for his pursuits. She had burned a book of his about the Rosicrucians. He also wanted to know how it would feel to have killed, and he saw killing as a fire baptism into the kind of life he wanted to lead and the kind of person he wanted to be. Queenie was the obvious choice for victim, ugly, stupid, unsympathetic, one who had never begun to see the light, a young soul. And she had a house which she had said over and over again she would leave to Lena. Brenda, her daughter, who lived in Newcastle, she never saw and got nothing from but a card at Christmas. Finn couldn’t understand why his mother wanted a house of her own, but she did want one, and Finn thought she had a better right to one than Queenie.

He carried the dream of killing her about with him for two years, but when he actually did the deed it happened spontaneously, almost by chance. One night Queenie awakened him and Lena, saying she had heard someone in the house downstairs. It was springtime, three in the morning.
Finn went down with Queenie. There was no one there, though a window was open and some money, about seven pounds in notes and change, had been taken out of a tin in one of the kitchen cupboards. Queenie was carrying the poker they used for riddling out the slow-burning stove in the living room.