The Keys to the Street (41 page)

“I remember the dog.”

Dorothea passed her the front page. There was not much text. It
was mostly photographs and headline:
THE MP AND HIS TOY
, with beneath it,
WHAT WAS THE LINK WITH MURDERED MAN
? One photograph was of a choleric-looking elderly man with bristly whiskers and badly cut hair, sitting at a table in what looked like a drinking club but might have been in a private house, next to a young heavily made-up girl with waist-length hair. A cigar with a pendulous head of ash pulled down one corner of his mouth. Fingers fat as sausages could be seen gripping the girl’s shoulder from behind. Her head rested on his shoulder. The caption read,
A Toy is only a toy but a good cigar is a smoke. James Barker-Pryce, Conservative Member for Somers Town and South Hampstead, parties with a friend
. The other photograph, snapped on a beach somewhere, was of Bean.

It was hard for Mary to take much in. Distraction does not always distract. She seemed to have no concentration. The lines of print danced.

“Here, you read it to me.”

“All right. I like reading aloud.
The missing link. The time has come for the public to be told. What was the connection between James Barker-Pryce MP and Leslie Arthur Bean, the murdered dog-walker?

“
It is several days since the police revealed that Bean was not The Impaler’s latest victim but that this was a copycat killing. Leslie Bean was well known to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s friend Miss Toy Townsende, 23, who has told police, ‘I knew Les when he was a butler. That was three or four years ago at my friend Mr. Maurice Clitheroe’s home. Les was employed by my friend James Barker-Pryce to walk his beautiful retriever dog Charlie, but I think there must have been some disagreement between them as the dog-walking ceased, though Les still paid visits to Mr. Barker-Pryce’s Regent’s Park home
.…’

“Can you imagine anyone actually talking like that?”

“It sounds libelous to me. How do they hope to get away with it?”

“Perhaps they don’t care.
On the phone today Mr. Barker-Pryce, 68, said he had no memory of any photograph of himself and Miss Townsende. It was possible she was the young lady who made a suggestion to
him while he was parking his Mercedes in Paddington Street, London W1, two months ago. Mrs. Julia Barker-Pryce, 62, Mr. Barker-Pryce’s wife of 33 years, was not available for comment. She and her husband are … Turn to page two
.

“Here’s a shot of the girl in a G-string. She can’t really be called Toy, can she?
She and her husband are spending the weekend at their country retreat at Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire
 … Upper Slaughter? I don’t believe it.”

“There really is a place called that. Dorrie, did you hear the front doorbell?”

“I don’t think so. Listen. It goes on,
Mr. Barker-Pryce later told our reporter
—I suppose they’re all barracking him outside his country house—‘
There was no quarrel between me and Mr. Bean. That would be impossible. He was a working man and I believe former servant. I dismissed him for incompetence and there is no truth in rumors that he visited my house or that I continued to pay him a remuneration
…’ Oh, that must have been the bell!”

The tikka man had come round the side of the house in search of them. He was wearing his red and white T-shirt with red jeans and carrying a tray laden with covered dishes, fastened to his torso with straps like a rucksack.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary said. “We weren’t sure if we heard the bell.”

“Shall I put it in the kitchen for you?”

“Thank you.”

He went indoors. When he came back, he gave Dorothea a doubtful look, then a smile and a, “I’m not mistaken, am I, madam?”

“No, no. You used to drive the dry cleaner’s van, didn’t you? Oh, it must be five years back.”

“That’s right. Spot on. And you live in Charles Lane up in St. John’s Wood.”

They began reminiscing. Mary went indoors, turned the oven on low, and put the korma, rice, and vegetables inside. Leo’s engagement ring that he had bought her in a shop in Camden Passage was
still on her finger. She took it off and wondered what would happen to it if she put it down the waste disposal unit and pressed the switch. It might break the unit. Better give it to some poor dosser to sell. She took it off and dropped it inside the cutlery drawer. Then she peeled two peaches, sliced them, and looked for a liqueur to pour over them. The Amaretto Leo had brought the previous week …

Even in her mind she had better stop calling him that. Leo wasn’t his name. He wasn’t Oliver either, he couldn’t even be called by the pseudonym under which she had so long known the recipient of her donation, for he wasn’t that recipient, it wasn’t into his bones that her marrow had been induced, but an unknown dead man’s.

She took the wine out of the refrigerator, found a corkscrew, and put it with two glasses on a tray. Dorothea was lying back in the lounging chair, gazing up at the pale sky, now covered with a network of vapor trails. Gushi had climbed onto her lap. The tikka man had gone.

“That poor man,” Dorothea said, sitting up. “He went to prison for running someone over when he was driving a laundry van. Of course I didn’t mention any of that. But I remembered. I don’t think you ought to go to prison if you didn’t
mean
to kill someone, do you?”

“Sometimes I think no one ought to go to prison for anything,” said Mary. “But that’s not very practical. Was he on drugs or drunk or what?”

“He’d been drinking,” said Dorothea. “Talking of which, do you want me to open that for you?”

•   •   •

The traffic in the Marylebone Road speeds up at the weekends. There is less of it, less to slow it down or bring it to frequent stops. On the Sundays of mid-August less traffic uses the road than perhaps on any other days of the year and it seems like some highway in the fifties or sixties when driving was pleasurable and the air relatively pure.

But on mid-August Saturdays, with so many people away on holiday and so many tourists car-less pedestrians, the traffic speeds along, three lanes of it, roaring up to Euston and the underpass or tearing down to Chapel Street, the Marylebone Flyover and the M40. Sometimes brakes shriek when a stop is enforced at Baker Street lights or those at Park Crescent. In the week it is a slow lumbering battering ram that plods at fifteen miles an hour, but on a late summer Saturday it becomes a swift juggernaut and therefore far more dangerous.

Mary thought all these things as she came back from buying bread in Marylebone High Street on Saturday morning. Gushi was tucked under her arm. She had brought him with her on a supernumerary walk but he was frightened by the traffic noise and buried his face in the palm of her hand. They crossed quickly and she brought him into the friendly green of the park. He ran down the bank and drank thirstily from the lake. Already a hot vapor hung over the broad expanses of grass, bleached yellow and in places entirely bared by the drought. The water with which the flowerbeds were sprayed first thing each morning had dried by now and some plants hung their heads. She kept to the shady side of the park.

A man on a seat was reading a paperback of
The Catcher in the Rye
, the woman at the other end of the bench a broadsheet newspaper with the front page headline:
MP TO SUE OVER MURDER AND SEX ALLEGATIONS
. Mary tried to think about her future, where she would live, what she would do. Leo, Oliver, that man whoever he was, had said,
Two days after we’re married my wife will be able to come and live with me
.…

She remembered then. Today the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home. He had said that because the Blackburn-Norrises were coming home and she would be free. She looked round for Gushi. He was making friends with a Jack Russell, touching noses, wagging tails. She went back for him, put him on the lead, gently shooed the other dog away.

“They’re coming home today,” she said to him. “Your master and mistress, your people, owners, whatever you call them. Come on, let’s get back fast.”

So that’s what I’ve come to, she thought, talking aloud to a dog in public. Gushi licked her fingers. No, he’s not sorry for you, he doesn’t understand, she said to herself, he’s a nice dog but he’s just a dog.

They went out into Albany Street by the Cumberland Gate and Cumberland Terrace. As they came into Park Village West the Blackburn-Norrises’ taxi was just pulling away from the gates of Charlotte Cottage.

•   •   •

He had slept that Friday night in his own flat for the sake of seeing the horror movie,
How to Make a Monster
. The boards, of raw beech that gave off a strong resinous smell, encased the broken windows and made of the interior a dusty kiln. There was no way of ventilating the place except by leaving the front door open and no one did that, no one dared. He’d gone through his ritual and used two rocks before the film started, then gone on to vodka, neat but with a spot of Tabasco sauce and a sprinkling of mustard. He didn’t need excuses but if he did he’d have said it was to take his mind off the stink in the flat and the heat. For his health’s sake, he nibbled at a Duchy Original biscuit, the gingered sort, with his drink.

The telly was still on when he woke up. His watch had stopped and he didn’t know what time it was. Dark or light, it was all the same in here, or almost. A strong sun high in the sky penetrated the cracks in the beech boards and laid bright bars across the bit of filthy carpet on the floor. The smell, he realized now, was himself. He smelled like the hamburger stall outside Madame Tussaud’s that the people in the mewses between the waxworks and the park complained filled their places with the reek of onions and fatty beef. He
wondered if it mattered or if he should do something about it. In the pitch dark something ran over his foot.

Hob yelled. He jumped up, smashed the light on with the flat of his hand, and saw the mice flee, scurrying for the honeycombed skirting board. It was only mice, that was all it was. They had been feasting on Duchy Original crumbs. He staggered to the bathroom and urinated copiously. His half-brother had told him blow made you pee a lot and he was right. The bath was full of dirty dishes, the washing up of weeks. He had long used up every piece of crockery he had, and it lay piled there, dusty by this time, coated with the little waxy white pellets like seeds that were fly eggs. Hob thought he saw things moving between a plate and a glass and he turned away. That was funny because he’d never hallucinated, he’d never been interested in acid, microdot, shrooms, or any of that stuff.

He decided against a bath. Where would he put the dishes? He went back and turned the telly off. He turned the light off too and lay on the settee. For some reason he started thinking about his brother-in-law that used to be before his sister divorced him. Hob had rather liked him, had felt sorry for him because when he was a teenager he’d done acid, just the once, and he’d been left years later with these visions of rats. They’d come at any time and crawl all over him. Hob’s ex-brother-in-law had been dead scared of rats, had a phobia about them, so it was a miserable existence he led. Shame, Hob thought. But he never thought about anything or anyone for long. Like alcoholics with drink, he thought about, talked to himself about, considered, wondered at, the substances he used. He would have talked to others about them, only there was no one to talk to.

The mice were back. He could hear them scuttering. Someone on the floor below had told him she’d woken up in the night and heard this trundling noise and when she shone her torch under the bed she’d seen this mouse rolling a Smartie she’d dropped toward a hole in the wall, pushing it with its nose. You had to laugh. He
saw a thread of light appear on the floor, then another. It must be morning.

Sometime today he was due to work over a bloke up in Agar Grove who’d done something that got up Lew’s nose—though not what he liked up there. Promised to take a bag of smack along with his dope and had reneged (Lew’s word) on the deal. Hob was getting a hundred for putting the shyster out of action for a couple of weeks and four rocks over the odds. His thoughts drifted to those rocks but he’d only got two left in the flat, so when thinking instead of
using
got too much, he wandered off looking for what he’d brought in the evening before. The red velvet bag, the stuff was with the bag, maybe in the kitchen.

He found it and poured the powder into a foil bag that had once held some adjunct, sensitive to light, of a photocopier. Like much of his paraphernalia, Hob had found it in a wastebin in one of the more prosperous parts. He slit open the bottom of the bag and held it over the powder in one of the saucers from the bath, screwed up the open top, and put his mouth over the resulting aperture. It wasn’t as clever or as satisfying as his watering can rose but it would do for now. Better than one of your ordinary stems, anyway. He lit the powder with a match.

It was angel dust, or phencyclidine, out of fashion and therefore relatively cheap. Hob had seen on telly that it was basically the stuff they shot into rhinos and elephants on darts to put them under when they moved them away from ivory hunters or whatever. PCP was a change and, anyway, he liked it because it made him feel unreal, like he was a person in that
How to Make a Monster
movie, living inside the telly and watched by millions, or else invisible and not watched at all. Both sensations were pleasant enough.

Sweat began to break out all over him. That was the effect of the dust, as was this floating sensation. He got up and walked about, took a few dancing steps, feeling suddenly like a tall thin man with a
small head and a ballet dancer’s feet. Maybe he’d get out of here and go and do the shyster over before the day had really begun.

He could feel his heart beating. The idea that you couldn’t always feel your heart beating amused him and he laughed as he danced about the flat, picking up what he needed. Unthinkable to go out without the red velvet bag, without something to keep him well, without something else to bring him down if the heartbeat got so strong it was painful. All ideas of having a bath or changing his clothes had receded. Who needed that shit?