Tigerlily's Orchids (29 page)

‘Well, I don't know, Marius. That slowest pace sounds like my solicitor and I've certainly been praying if not crying.'

‘The death bit doesn't seem to apply,' said Marius, ‘for which we should be thankful.'

But perhaps it did. When he was young Marius had longed to sleep in till ten or even midday. He seldom got the chance. Now there was nothing to stop him sleeping in he invariably woke up at six, and this morning because of the heat, it was just before four thirty. The sky was the colour that has no name, a gauze of grey veiling palest blue. He stood in Rose's open front window, savouring the fresh cool morning that would become milder in two or three hours' time. Kenilworth
Avenue had its dawn look, depopulated, still, crammed with cars on both sides. In the gap between two of the cars, a space about a yard long, he could see something lying up against the hedge. Or someone. Someone or something lay on the pavement.

Marius took his keys and his mobile and ran across the road.

‘But death comes not at call,' he murmured to himself. On his knees by the body, he soon knew it wasn't a body but a living, though unconscious, man. Duncan still clutched a single key in his hand. A torch lay beside him. Marius dialled 999 and waited. He took off his sweater, rolled it up and laid it under Duncan's head. He sat there, waiting as the sun came up. Oh, come on, come on, what are you doing? Where are you? ‘Justice divine,' he thought, ‘mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.'

And then the waiting and howling came from far off, grew louder, waking up everyone in Kenilworth Avenue, as the ambulance arrived, parked and two paramedics came running.

‘T
hat's four times we've had an ambulance down here since February,' said Molly. ‘Two times for poor Stuart, twice for Olwen and now this.'

Carl nodded slowly. ‘Somebody like mugged him, is that right?'

The two of them were drinking cappuccinos in the Bel Esprit Centre. ‘Hit him on the head with a blunt instrument, poor old thing. That's what they call it, a blunt instrument. His money and his mobile were gone so they must have got those.'

‘Is he going to make it?'

‘I don't know. Fingers crossed.'

‘May as well be dead at his age, though.' Carl yawned.
‘I'm getting you a ring as soon as I've like got the dosh. It won't be long. Then other guys'll see you're engaged.'

‘Oh, Carl, I don't know,' said Molly.

T
oday was the day to do it. Olwen had planned it carefully, having nothing else to do. Things would have been easier if she had had any money but she had none and no means of getting any. A look of unmistakable relief had crossed Margaret's face when Olwen told her she had lost her bank card.

‘Well, you won't need it, will you?'

‘Not really,' said Olwen to be on the safe side.

‘You've got to take some exercise. Some gentle walking is all that means. It's not as if you want to go shopping.'

Someone who's going to die soon ought to be able to do everything they want, Olwen thought. There was only one thing she wanted – to drink and die. To drink herself to death, as she had always intended, but do it in her own time. If she had to do that by stealing, well, so be it. She would steal. Others had stolen from her, that girl especially, that girl who had her bank card. It no longer mattered. She no longer cared.

Part of Olwen's plan had involved going out for small walks. Just so that when the time came she could get as far as the taxi. Using a stick helped. It displeased her that she was better able to walk, that she was stronger, because she knew this must be due to having no alcohol for the past weeks. The day was very hot, the whole of this month of June was being one of the hottest Junes ever. Olwen was wearing her black tracksuit bottoms and an old black T-shirt with a faded and no longer identifiable logo on its front. Margaret switched on the fan for Olwen and said she was going next door to see Helen.

‘I'll be an hour at the most.'

That meant at least three hours. One hour would have been enough for Olwen's purpose. Once Margaret was out of the way, Olwen found the number of the taxi service the family used in their personal directory and with it the account number. She pressed the requisite keys on the phone, gave Margaret's name and the password she had so often heard her use, and when they asked her where she wanted to go, she said, ‘Kenilworth Green.'

‘What's the postcode?'

Olwen didn't know. Maybe she had known once but she didn't any longer. They looked it up and it took a long time.

‘When would you like it?'

‘As soon as possible.'

Olwen found an environmentally friendly shopping bag in a kitchen cupboard and put into it the almost full bottle of gin and the unopened bottle of brandy from Margaret's drinks cupboard. If they had known her better, Olwen thought, her cunning, her need, her unscrupulousness, they wouldn't have left it there. Margaret wouldn't see the taxi come because she and Helen invariably sat in the room at the back.

It came two minutes early. Carrying her bag of drink in her left hand and grasping the stick in her right, Olwen made her way down the path and the driver got out to help her into the taxi. It was quite a long journey from Harrow but when she reached the kissing gate there was, of course, nothing to pay because the cab was on account. The Kenilworth Green turf was no longer a uniform green but bleached in patches to pale straw.

Olwen had intended to find some tree or shrub cover under which to hide herself, and trees there were in plenty but none to sit under and not be seen. She had only once before been in the place and then had hardly been aware of the
neighbouring cemetery. That was a place which had plenty of cover – trees with undergrowth, overgrown slabs and tombstones. What better, what more appropriate place to die? The hedge which separated it from Kenilworth Green was low, no more than three or four feet high. Climbing it had been easy for Stuart and Wally and all those others who frequented this place, a mere matter of stepping over. Not for Olwen. Limping up here with the aid of her stick had been almost too much for her. She crawled along the hedge, stopping every few moments to rest, and just before the hedge met the high boundary fence she saw that it had been broken down. Purposely? Perhaps, for it looked as if someone or even some animal had forced a way through. Olwen just managed to step over the broken bit and on the other side found herself up to her knees in grass and nettles, brushwood and brambles.

Children were out in a playground on the other side of the cemetery, running around, shrieking and pushing each other. Olwen had no idea there was a school there. She had noticed very little of the neighbourhood when she lived at Lichfield House. Blundering on, holding on to gravestones for support, she gave up when she found herself a shady spot between a large cuboid tomb, box-shaped and of dark granite, and a dense wall of privet. This wall was perhaps four feet high as if someone had intended to create a hedge across the cemetery but given up after putting in no more than three or four plants.

It reminded her of when she was very young, a child of seven or eight. There had been just such a section of hedge in her parents' garden, with a space between it and the rear fence, and she had spent many hours inside it, first covering the top of the space with branches and calling it her camp. She had had cans of Tizer in there – oh, the innocence of
it – and biscuits and had taken her pet dog with her when he would come.

Inside this sanctuary she sat down on the grass, sat down with great difficulty, squatting first, then kneeling, then easing herself to lean against the side of the tomb. It would be impossible for her ever to get up unless aided and she wouldn't be aided. All was silent now, the schoolchildren had gone in, traffic was a distant murmur. The ground was very dry and dusty, the air still and warm. Slowly, because she was savouring this moment, this preliminary, she unscrewed the cap on the gin bottle, lifted it to her lips and drank.

Olwen thought she had never in her entire life experienced such ecstasy. It was the most blissful drink she had ever taken. Briefly she thought of the cruelty of those who had taken it from her and would keep it from her. But she had eluded them, she had triumphed. Closing her eyes, she tilted the bottle and poured gin down her throat. She was happy.

H
alf a dozen miles away, Duncan had regained consciousness soon after he arrived at the Royal Free Hospital. They gave him a scan and then another scan and it seemed he had no brain damage. A doctor told him he had had a very lucky escape as if what had happened to him was his own fault. Perhaps it had been, Duncan didn't know, because he had no memory of events prior to and immediately after the attack. The hospital wanted to know if there was anyone near to him they should contact and Duncan said Jock and Kathy Pember. He could remember things like that but not what had happened to him just before he was hit on the head. A policeman came to see him and Duncan told him he thought he must have been for a walk somewhere in green fields.
He remembered a lot of leaves. No, he no longer had a mobile and he was sure he hadn't any money or credit cards with him when he went out. The policeman thought his mind was wandering because he had never before encountered anyone without a mobile.

Later in the day the Pembers came. Jock asked if he could describe his attacker but lost interest when Duncan said he could remember nothing about what had happened to him. Then Kathy told a long story she had read somewhere about a woman in the United States picking out her assailant in an identity parade. How could she tell it was him?

‘He was the only one wearing handcuffs,' Kathy said.

Duncan said rather crossly that his case couldn't be a parallel because he had no memory of an assailant, wouldn't have believed he had an assailant but for the bang on his head. He told Ken and Moira about the leaves when they came next day. Not a few leaves as it might be on a single plant but fields of them.

‘You were dreaming,' Ken said. ‘That's what it was. Were you brought up in the countryside?'

‘I suppose I was.'

‘Well, there you are then. You were reverting to childhood. Sugar beet, those leaves would have been.

Duncan was allowed to go home next day. A wall of heat met him when he got inside the house. The first thing he did was take off his jacket and then he felt in his pocket for his handkerchief to wipe off the sweat which had started all over his face. No handkerchief was there. Perhaps he really was doing what Ken had suggested and reverting to his childhood, for what he brought out was a crumpled tissue and with it two green stems with withered leaves attached. Then he remembered. The memory came back in disjointed fragments but it came back, the green rows, the intense heat, the smell,
the stairs, the cupboard with the heating gauge, the movement behind him as he reached the foot of the stairs …

H
e had to sit down for a while because he felt weak. But from the moment he left the hospital in a small new-fangled kind of ambulance, he resolved he would seek out the man who they told him had found him lying on the pavement and had called for help. Marius Potter. Duncan didn't really know him but he remembered seeing him from his window at Stuart's party and the funeral. He took himself carefully across the road, thinking he could do with a stick but not wanting to start that, not that slippery slope to old age, that thin end of the wedge. No caretaker was about, apparently they hadn't yet found a replacement for Wally Scurlock. Duncan rang Marius's bell and then he rang Rose's. Neither was answered. Unbeknown to Duncan, or any other neighbours for that matter, Rose and Marius were in St Ebba's, getting married, their only witnesses Marius's sister Meriel and her husband.

The vicar, who was old and quiet and short-sighted, told them they were the only couple ‘of your age' he had ever been called upon to marry who hadn't been married before. He found it a matter for wonderment that each had attained such seniority yet remained single. Marius and Rose smiled but said nothing. Rose wore a very ordinary summer dress and Marius wore the only suit he possessed. The ring he put on her finger had belonged to his mother. After the ceremony they walked across the cemetery to step over the hedge to Kenilworth Green, passing quite close to Olwen in her leafy nest, but not seeing her. They passed through the kissing gate and hurried back to Lichfield House because McPhee fretted if he was left alone for too long.

They were going up the steps and the doors were already opening to receive them when Duncan came across the road for the third time. Neither Marius nor Rose said anything to Duncan about being the first to congratulate them but Marius asked Duncan how he was and how he hoped he was fully recovered.

‘I want to thank you for rescuing me. Finding me on the pavement like that and calling an ambulance. Beyond the call of duty it was.'

Marius would have liked to say that he couldn't very well have left Duncan where he lay but he only smiled and said he had rather enjoyed it. It had been a small adventure.

‘Well, now I've run you to earth, perhaps you can tell me what this is. Not orchid leaves, is it?'

‘It's cannabis,' said Marius. ‘We should tell the police.'

D
eng, Tao and the two girls were having a conference in the back garden of Springmead when the police came. Or Deng was taking Tao to task, not for attacking Duncan but for not finishing him off. They could have disposed of a body but not of a living man. That Duncan was living they knew for they had seen him in his garden lying on his recliner. The girls took no part in this. They knew better than to intervene.

Deng was telling Tao to take Xue and Li-li back to the flat and leave him at Springmead to watch and wait, when there came from the front the unmistakable sound of a door being broken down.

‘To the car. Now,' Deng said and then ran to the garage. They were out in the lane, heading for the Watford Way, when the police burst through the black curtain, got the French windows open and were in the garden. It wasn't Blakelock and Bashir
but officers of the drugs squad. Upstairs they went, through the plantations, into the tiny room where the Chinese people had slept. The heat and the ultraviolet lights were almost overpowering.