Unchained Melanie (6 page)

‘There’s a man in your garden, dear.’ Mrs Jenkins was glaring through the tangled roses at Max.

‘Yes, it’s all right – he’s here to look at the garden, see what needs to be done.’

‘You should let me have a word then. You were never any good with plants. You can’t go wrong with delphiniums.’

Melanie rather thought she could – she’d bought any number of them over the years and every single one had gone to fatten the slugs and snails in gardens for
miles around. She was convinced they made special journeys, tipped off by garden-centre slug-spies that she’d just parted with another sixty pointless quids’ worth of fresh leaf-stock for them to munch. Perfect Patty, only four houses away, had an entire bedful of delphiniums, immaculate flower-spikes pointing obediently heavenwards.

‘I tell you what, I’ll pop in and see you later,’ Mel told Mrs Jenkins. ‘Tell you what Max and I have decided,’ she said, disentangling herself from what could become a decidedly cross-purpose conversation.

Max consulted the drawing on his pad. ‘If you think you could run to a couple of pretty decent-sized
Washingtonias
over there,’ he pointed to the corner by the back gate, ‘plus a clump of those classic Cornish palms, the
Cordyline australis
, fast-growing and not too pricey, and some of the biggest
phormiums
, that should soon screen the garden off from the alleyway and the backs of those garages in the next road.’

‘What about the manky cherry tree by the back gate? It’s been unhappy for years but don’t you have to get permission to cut it down?’

‘It’s a fruit tree, so it’s no problem. And those young sycamores can go, they’re just weeds.’

‘Right. So what’s staying?’

Max looked at her over his reading glasses. The look was an amused one, as if all this time there’d been some major, important point that she’d been missing. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Not the roses, not the clematis or the horrible lavatera?’ This was bold stuff. Her father would have heart failure.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ Max insisted. ‘Your garden is having a completely fresh start.’

Melanie sent Tina Keen up a ladder in a dusty attic room above a coffee shop from where she peered out of the window between the slats of a chrome Venetian blind. Melanie stopped typing and thought about how much the scent of cappuccino would take the edge off her detective’s concentration. She could have let her have a coffee and a sandwich sent up from downstairs – but then someone on the staff would have had to know she was there, and that someone might just be the killer. Perhaps she could have brought a flask in with her, before the evening shift in the café had started. But Tina wasn’t the flask type, not unless it was of the hip variety and filled with five-star brandy against an evening stake-out chill.

Melanie sat back in her chair and gazed out of the window. It was dusk, but she could just make out the Thames shimmering between the houses beyond her back garden. The tide was high and parked cars down by the bridge would soon be sitting like small metal islands in the water, the tide creeping up their wheels, under the doors and then soaking the floors. Later, the river would slink away again, leaving the road fresh and wet, the cars’ tyres glistening clean stark black. Their oblivious drivers would return, would drive away, wonder about the strange noise from the exhaust, gradually realize that the floor was wetly tacky and that there was a smell that hadn’t been there before. That was what she had to get into this chapter, she thought, as she started typing again. When Tina and her DCI went down through the back of the coffee shop after a long and bad-tempered fruitless watching session, the terrible realization that the next murder victim was already lying dead and cruelly mutilated in
the cubbyhole beneath the stairs would have to seep into their senses like the stench of rotting river water.

It was close to midnight when Melanie finished working for the day. The heating had gone off hours ago and her fingers were starting to set into cold curves over the keyboard. She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime and her stomach was telling her it was painfully empty. Down in the kitchen she opened the fridge and found a big slab of Cheddar, which she grated over a couple of thick slices of bread. She shoved the lot under the grill and poured herself a generous and well-earned glass of red wine. Outside some kind of animal life skittered about and a cat yowled a raucous warning to an invading creature in the garden. Mel sat rigid at the table, not looking at the uncurtained window and waiting for her heart to stop pounding. That was the problem with writing about the most terrifyingly gruesome things that could happen, you never stopped imagining the worst. What was important, she told herself as she switched the grill off and topped up her wine glass, was to switch her mind off along with the computer. Tina Keen and the macabre, murderous world she inhabited were only pretend. Really.

Melanie had left the radio tuned to Radio Four and when she returned home and switched it on she could trust it not to be blaring out Chris Tarrant at full volume. She also knew that if there’d been bread in the cupboard before she went out to the gym in the morning, she’d be able to have toast when she got back. These small truisms occurred to her as she got into the car and chucked her bag onto the back seat. Superficially trivial facts like these represented significant milestones – with Rosa occupying the house no such things could ever be counted on. No item of food was safe, no last half-inch of milk, no final scrapings from the marmalade jar or sticky crystals from the bottom of the sugar bowl. Before, when Mel had gone out in the morning, she’d had to gamble with herself whether it was worth calling in to the corner store to do a quick restock in case she felt acute exercise-induced near-starvation after her workout and swim. There’d be that nagging thought in the back of her head that in the cupboard the loaf was down to barely more than a drying heel – just enough for a desperate snack – but only for one. Rosa, who, when Melanie left
would have been fast asleep and dead to all but her dreams, would be up before her mother got back, scavenging the kitchen for something sweet and filling. Toast, with honey, jam or marmalade, was what she craved on waking. And back into the fridge would go an empty, scraped-out jar, back in the cupboard would go the bread wrapper containing only crumbs. Empty banana skins would be replaced to blacken and seep their sweetly rotting aroma on top of the fruit bowl.

‘At least she puts things away,’ Sarah had commented, watching Melanie one day as she discovered a pair of completely empty ketchup bottles in her store cupboard. ‘Mine just leave everything scattered around like a burglary gone wrong.’

‘I wouldn’t call it “away”,’ Mel had replied. ‘Throwing the empties in the bin would count as “putting away”. I blame all that emphasis on recycling and conservation at school – she finds it just about impossible to consign anything to the trash.’

Today Melanie had left the kitchen as tidy as a show house. And when she got home it would, so long as robbers hadn’t come ransacking, be just the same. She smiled broadly to herself and, as the car slowed to join the queue at the traffic lights, she realized an entire grumpy bus queue was staring at her and judging her to be mad. One member of the queue was Ben, the school-bound son of her neighbour, Perfect Patty. As the car drew level, the boy glowered at her, slouching his shoulders into habitual teen sullen mode, but then suddenly he smiled back at her in recognition. Astonished at this transformation from hunched hostility, Mel waved, lowered the window and called to him, ‘Ben! I’m going past your school, would you like a lift?’

The boy flung his scuffed bag into the car and folded his long self in after it. He brought with him the scents of a recently smoked cigarette, hair gel, and a lemony tang of deodorant. He was only a couple of years younger than Rosa, approaching A levels next year, Mel guessed, but, as his school still demanded the wearing of a uniform right through to the bitter end, he looked a lot less grown-up than Rosa had at that age. No wonder he usually seems so surly, Melanie thought with sympathy, it must be tough being seventeen and having to face the mean suburban streets each day in a red and black striped blazer.

‘You going to the gym? That one behind St Dominic’s?’ he asked, glancing at her Nike bag on the back seat.

‘I am. But I don’t go as often as I should.’ She laughed and prodded her thighs, encased like overstuffed sausages in workout leggings. ‘In my job there’s too much opportunity for sitting around and letting the legs spread.’

Oh God, why had she said that? She could feel herself going ludicrously pink. Perhaps (vain wish) he’d passed that age when just about anything was remotely
double entendre
-ish? Unlikely, especially a boy at a single-sex school without the scornful but essentially more mature presence of girls. Or perhaps the comment had passed him by. A woman of her age, well, probably he wasn’t even listening. Teenage boys were a bit of a mystery to her. The only one she ever had any dealings with was her nephew William, but he was only fourteen and not communicative unless a conversation contained the word ‘PlayStation’.

‘So wassit like down the gym? D’you do weights and stuff?’ Kind boy, she thought – he couldn’t possibly
care less what she inflicted on her flabby body in the gym. Patty and David had obviously passed on to him their good-manners genes.

‘Well, I usually start off with the bike for twenty minutes, then do a circuit of various machines, some stretches on the mat and then if the pool’s not too crowded I have a swim.’

‘Is there a sauna?’

‘There’s two, one in each changing room.’

‘In each?’ Ben looked puzzled.

‘Men and women. Separate.’

‘Oh. Right. Yeah well I suppose they would be.’ She’d reached the roundabout where commuters were doing their daily resentful battle with school-run parents, and couldn’t take her eyes off the teeming road to glance at his face, couldn’t guess whether he was laughing (at her?) or (his turn) blushing.

‘Well, this isn’t Sweden,’ she teased.

‘Nah, shame.’ He
was
laughing.

The traffic thinned as they left the main London-bound road. Assorted boys in the same red and black as Ben sloped along reluctantly towards their school day. Some hung about in groups in shop doorways, swigging from drinks cans like the winos on the Green. Younger ones play-punched each other and chucked their bags around. Next to her, Ben watched them. ‘Pathetic,’ he murmured at the scene in general.

‘Where do you want me to drop you? Somewhere safely past the school gates?’ How uncool it was, or not, to be seen in the company of a middle-aged woman (who looked decidedly early-morning and
sans
make-up) she had no idea.

‘No, the gates are fine. I don’t have a problem being
seen with you . . . unless you do of course . . .’ He was openly mocking her now.

‘I’ll get over it,’ she told him, stopping the car.

As he got out he hesitated. ‘Thanks for the lift and . . . er, I know it’s a bit of a cheek but do you often go to the gym? I mean, winter’s coming. It gets wet and cold at the bus stop . . .’

‘OK, OK, if I’m going I’ll look out for you. But I don’t always go at the same time,’ she warned.

‘Cool, good enough.’ He treated her to a final smile as he turned and sauntered through the gates, and Mel was left with a Cheshire cat-like display of the most perfect teeth modern orthodontic treatment could provide.

Sarah’s car was parked as close as she could get to the gym’s doors. Mel parked the Golf between a pair of the massive tank-like vehicles favoured by the women of the area – yuppie trucks, Rosa called them. It must have been raining when Sarah arrived, either that or she had slid out of the car all geared up and ready for the cross-trainer in her little pink Nike shorts and cropped-off vest and didn’t want the outside world to catch sight of her exposed tummy. Sarah’s gym outfits, particularly the lime snake-print leggings, it occurred to Mel, would sit neatly on her Tina Keen detective. Sarah and Tina had similar clothes taste and both were skinny, wiry women, though Tina was a few inches shorter and a good bit faster-moving. If the two had to escape from a burning building, Tina would be swifter off the mark, out of the nearest window, pausing only to pocket her cigarettes and shimmying down a drain-pipe as if SAS-trained. Sarah would be sizing up all possible exits for the one that would do the least damage to her nails.

Mel took her time in the changing room, shoving her reluctant feet into her state-of-the-art trainers that were far too high-tech for the paltry amount of exercise she took in them. She almost felt sorry for them, for the lack of decent challenge she offered, their soles barely scuffed from sauntering round on the gym’s carpets as she took her time ambling between the weights machines, stopping for chats here and there. The most she asked of these shoes was that they didn’t slip on the pedals of the stationary bike as she watched Lorraine Kelly organizing viewer makeovers on GMTV.

‘Oh, you’re here! Have you been in yet?’ Sarah, her face flushed as seaside-rock pink as her outfit, bounded in and flopped down on the bench next to Melanie.

‘No. I just got here. I gave Perfect Patty’s boy a lift to school.’

‘Huh!’ Sarah snorted. ‘His school’s only next door, it’s hardly out of your way.’ She poked a sharp finger into Mel’s leg. ‘You’re slacking. We need you toned and honed for the meat market. And book a sunbed, manicure and facial too. If I’m going to relaunch you as a desirable product I want to have something good to sell.’

‘You don’t give up do you, Sarah?’ Mel stood up and went to the mirror, tying her hair back into a scrunchie. ‘I’m really truly not looking for another man. I’m living completely on my own now for the first time since I was – well, ever, really and it’s great. Let me just enjoy it, OK?’

‘OK.’ Sarah sighed and looked sulky. ‘But – if you won’t go out with boys will you come out with the girls? Our dear old school’s having a final reunion. They’re closing it for good, knocking the place down
and building something – social housing I think – so will you come to that? Thursday week?’