Willing Flesh (24 page)

When she opens the door to the lounge, Staffe is kneeling at the woman’s feet. She is on the chaise longue, cupping a mug of tea. Sylvie can see that she has been crying. Staffe stands, but her focus is on the woman, following each flit of the eye. She has a certain beauty. Easy to see that men would want her.

‘This is …’ says Staffe.

Sylvie crosses the room, extends her hand and says, ‘Rosa, I presume,’ sitting beside her. ‘Welcome to our home. A bit of a madhouse, I’m afraid. Is there anything we can get you?’

Rosa shakes her head, looks up, past Sylvie, to Staffe.

‘Something sweet. Go and get the biscuits, Will.’

‘She doesn’t want one.’

‘Well I do!’ Sylvie looks at Rosa as she says it, forcing a smile and the instant Staffe is through the door, she says, ‘I’m Sylvie. Will’s fiancée.’ She searches for a look of surprise on Rosa’s face, but none is forthcoming. ‘Perhaps you should explain what’s going on.’

‘Maybe Will should tell you.’

‘Maybe he should. But I’m guessing you know him better than that.’

‘I’m in trouble.’

‘So why not go to the police?’

‘Will is the police.’

‘It’s a rather personal service, isn’t it?’ Sylvie leans back, crosses her legs and looks Rosa up and down, notices the thick denier at the top of her stockings; thinks, ‘Not in this weather.’

‘Will is a friend. We’ve been friends for years and years.’

‘We’ve been lovers – on and off, for years and years. Strange, that he’s never talked of you.’

‘I’m a prostitute,’ says Rosa.

In the scheme of whatever Rosa has been through, thinks Sylvie, this admission must be nothing, but nonetheless it makes Sylvie feel ashamed. ‘Have you been more than friends?’

Rosa smiles with weak lips. Her eyes are seven parts dead. ‘I know this is your home, but you wouldn’t believe what I have been through tonight. You should ask Will about us.’ She looks out, into the night. ‘Not that there is an “us”.’

‘Is this to do with the two other girls?’

And now, Rosa does break down. She convulses, trying not to cry. Sobbing, she says, ‘They were my friends.’

Sylvie shifts towards her and wraps her arms around Rosa. She is cold and her skin feels hard, perhaps because of the gooseflesh. As she breathes in and out, she realises that Rosa smells of absolutely nothing.

*

In the dark, a heavy footfall peters to nothing. Another door closes.

Arabella shivers, reaches out with a long, slender arm for flesh, but Darius is gone. She wraps her arms around her own body, runs her hands along her ribs. She tucks her knees up to her chest and nestles deeper into the bed. An engine splutters then dies and her dreams come back as a reprise of the footfall and doors, and in this thin prelude to sleep, Arabella smiles, waits for Darius to come back; his flesh to hers. They will soon find a better place, to conduct this life.

Opening her eyes, she turns over, waits for him to come. The door opens and she gasps at what she sees.

Arabella doesn’t recognise him, nor his friend; at first she thinks this could be happening within her sleep, still. They wear masks, so it could be Darry, but why would he? He comes across to her, fast. His hands are rough with her. They’re talking in tongues and she lashes out with her long legs, but she hurts when they kick against the men in the masks. She hits out with her arms but soon becomes breathless.

In the end, she surrenders – quite willingly. A darkness comes, like blessed relief, as a shroud drapes itself over and all around her, bringing with it a profound silence. She cannot even hear the wash of her blood or the beat of her heart.

She feels she is gone to another place and hopes Darius knows how much she loves him. She should have told him so. She wishes she had seen her father one last time, prays to all that is sacred that she will somehow feel a final embrace from Imogen. And strangely, she fears for Roddy. Alone with his father, smothered by all that.

Arabella has a memory of him coming to her after Imogen died. He sat on her bed and held her hand – but it was he who was crying. He was fourteen years old and she hears it now, but these thoughts, these feelings already feel like an echo, ebbing, ebbing away until there is nothing but nothing.

Twenty-one

Staffe knocks, waits a beat, then turns the handle. Pennington looks up, as if caught in mischief, but all he’s doing is reading the
Telegraph
.

‘There’s been another attack.’ Staffe pulls up a chair.

‘Attack?’

‘On a prostitute. So, unless Graham Blears broke out in the night, he’s not your man.’

‘It could be a separate incident. Not everything is connected, Will.’

‘If you close this case, how many other girls could be putting themselves at risk. She could have bloody died, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Who could have died?’

‘She is a friend of mine, as it happens.’

‘Rosa Henderson?’

‘How do you know about her?’

Pennington folds the
Telegraph
, perfectly. ‘She was in the phones of Elena Danya and Rebeccah Stone. I made it my business to discover the ins and outs of her. I
am
a detective you know.’

‘So you can see she’s connected. And last night she was attacked. In a hotel – just like Elena Danya.’

‘How come it wasn’t reported? It should have been on the area bulletin.’

‘She called me.’

Pennington grimaces. ‘And you have her?’

‘I feel like a bloody duck on the fair.’

‘I have a killer, Will. I have a confession. We didn’t exactly beat it out of him.’

‘I found Arabella Howerd. Her father and Markary are in a deal together, up in Suffolk.’

‘That’s where you went.’

‘Is there a reason I shouldn’t go back?’

Pennington shrugs, as if he is indifferent, but Staffe knows him well enough – which Pennington knows. ‘Howerd’s well connected,’ says Pennington, standing up, making it clear this exchange has run its course. And in doing so, punctuating the last thing he said.

*

Leonard Howerd will not go into the bank until after lunch today. He is in his favourite armchair in his study, which is off a half landing at the back of the house, overlooking his private garden. The branches of the silver birch and the laburnum are white-hatched with frost. He looks down at the
Spectator
which he has been nursing for two hours while he waits.

Better times waft up from the garden, tapping the windows, almost. Even when he was up to his eyes in work, when the bank was on its knees after his father died and the vultures were swooping, he would lay down his papers and listen from here. He would sneak a peek so they wouldn’t see him: Imogen and Arabella. That was before everything changed, for the worse. Like her mother, Arabella loves too well. He misses Imogen terribly, if he is truthful, and it takes its toll on Roddy, he knows. But he can do nothing about it.

The telephone rings.

The voice is not unfamiliar and the instruction is within the realms of what he might have expected. He tries to pretend this is progress, but his heart lags behind, like a stubborn child.

Leonard treads gently into his son’s room, puts his hand on Roddy’s shoulder and squeezes, then ruffles his hair. He thinks about how it was Imogen who always took the shine to Roddy, and as he flutters from sleep, Leonard suffers a ghost stroke from the boy’s mother.

He turns, quickly, but of course nothing is there, and when he turns back, Roddy is sitting upright, blinking at his father, saying, ‘Is it time?’

Leonard puts his hand on Roddy’s head, which makes the son flinch. ‘I’ll make us some tea and we can go through everything. You’re aware of the consequences should we falter.’ Leonard talks to his son as if he is addressing his board of directors.

Roddy forces a weak smile and swings his legs out of bed, donning his dressing gown as he makes his way down the stairs, sentried by portraits of many generations of stern-faced Howerds. At the bottom turn is a self-portrait of his mother. Sometimes, it seems as if Imogen – the Saltburgh sea grey and yellow behind her – is secretly smiling in the painting. She had confected her pigments to imply despair, but today, Roddy sees the secret smile and he feels sure that on this of all days, she will look down on him.

As his father brings a pot of tea to the kitchen table, Roddy says, ‘This is the only way, isn’t it.’

Leonard is attentive to every detail of the milking of the cups and stirring of the pot, the setting of the saucers and the strainer. Imogen used to ask him why he couldn’t just make it up in a mug like everybody else. He would reply that soon everybody would be doing that. He doesn’t answer his son.

‘Are you afraid?’ asks Roddy.

Leonard doesn’t entirely understand his son’s question. When there is only one thing to be done, one thread of honour in this pall that cloaks them, how can there be such a thing as fear?

*

The morning snow has been walked away on Cambridge Heath Road. The steel and glass, the teak and linen of the City are behind Staffe now as he strides through the market waste of plantains and ladies’ fingers, going to a sweet, rotting mush. Even though it is barely lunchtime, the stallholders have had enough, are packing away. He passes the Blind Beggar with its Gladstone livery and its thinly veneered, cheap and bashed modern interior. John the Hat would turn in his grave.

Left, under the viaduct, London becomes suddenly black and his steps echo. The arches are so low he has to stoop as he passes through and the other side is Wilmot Street, where he once owned a flat in the mansard roof, next to the Hague School with its gothic gables and bittersweet playground songs.

Staffe looks back to the dormant cranes, like giant metal spiders warring on the world, and he realises he is on the very limit of his jurisdiction. The sounds here are sharp and sporadic: dogs and smashing glass; squealing cars and a shout here, a scream, there. He turns left onto the High Road and past Pellicci’s Café, pausing to check the Chicken Peperonata is still on.

He pops into a newsagent’s to make a quick purchase and then heads away from the piste of saris and salwar kameez – some are luscious emerald or burgundy, some putrid lilac or tangerine. Soon, it is grey and bleak in the canyons and courtyards of mid-rise Victorian tenements and sixties deck-access. He looks up at the Atlee, Nicola Stone’s block.

There, on the corner and looking like she doesn’t belong to these streets, is Rosa. Her eyes glisten and her hair is soft. She raises a hand, pulls her coat around her.

Staffe and Rosa make their way up and are shown into the lounge. Cans pit the coffee table like a chess game gone wrong and Nicola picks one up, takes a swig. She is still in her dressing gown. By the sound and smell of things, a man is in the bedroom.

‘Thought they’d got the bastard done for my Rebeccah,’ says Nicola.

‘Rebeccah knew something she shouldn’t have, Mrs Stone. Something her friend Elena told her. It’s what got her killed and I need you to think hard about anything she might have said to you.’

‘Who’s this girl?’ says Nicola, nodding suspiciously at Rosa.

‘A friend of mine.’

Rosa smiles at Nicola, knowing the gossamer separation of a hard plight from an impossible one. ‘And Rebeccah was a friend of mine, Nicola.’

‘You trick with her?’

‘Did Rebeccah mention she had any plans?’ says Staffe.

‘She were always daydreaming. Just like her father.’ She nods in the direction of the bedroom.

‘Would she have spoken to him about it?’

‘Don’t you go getting him all fired up.’

‘Did she ever talk about Elena?’

Nicola Stone shakes her head, drains her can.

‘D’you keep a room for her here?’