The Paying Guests(142)

And even in the twenty or so minutes that she had been away from the house she had started to worry about what might be happening there in her absence. She turned her back on Walworth and hurried up the hill, with every step growing more convinced that she would find the place swarming with policemen.



The house was just as she had left it. Her mother was still in her room: she didn’t emerge until after seven, when Frances tapped meekly at her door to say that dinner was ready. They passed a strained evening together, Mrs Wray keeping to her chair with a blanket over her knees, and answering any remark of Frances’s with a vagueness, a doubt, a delay… Frances lay wide awake in bed that night, knowing that her mother was downstairs lying wide awake too; thinking of the tick, tick of her mother’s mind as it pieced things together.

But nothing was said the following morning. Her mother was pale, calm, distant. Frances went out as soon as she could for the early papers, fully expecting to see some change in the reporting of the case; there was no mention anywhere, however, of the spooning couple. The police were pressing on with their manhunt and had evidently widened their search: they were said to be interviewing people as far away as Dulwich. But Charlie’s name did not appear in any of the columns, and, realising that, she began to recover some of her confidence. How strong, after all, was the case against him? It was all speculation, surely? There was no evidence to support it. And even if the police were to go so far as to arrest him – well, she thought determinedly, arresting someone wasn’t the same as charging them. He’d simply have to come clean, then, about what he’d been up to on Friday night. If he was at some brothel or drug-den, or whatever the hell he’d been doing, he’d surely sooner admit that than be charged with his best friend’s murder. As for the timings of it all – it couldn’t matter what time Leonard was killed. There was still absolutely nothing to suggest that he had been killed in the house; nothing to link his death with Lilian or with her.

After a silent lunch, her mother announced quietly that she was going out for an hour or two. Frances looked at her, and felt herself whiten: she imagined that she had made up her mind to speak to the police. But it was some charity business, her mother said as she put on her coat; a set of minutes that had to be delivered to one of her committees. No, Frances was kind to offer, but she was happy to take them herself. She wanted to call in to church – her eyelids fluttered as she spoke – she wanted to call in to church on her way home.

Perhaps, then, she planned to confide not in the police but in the vicar. Frances watched her go with a feeling of doom. Suppose Mr Garnish were to talk? She had to think it through, be ready.

But she had the house to herself: that was an unexpected gift. This was the first time since Leonard’s death that she had been alone in it. She had to make the most of the next two hours. She ought to look for signs, for evidence.

She felt better as soon as she’d started. Upstairs in the sitting-room, the blood-stains were as visible as ever, but the carpet, she saw now, had other marks on it, streaks of dirt and spots of ink, something that might have been a splash of tea: there was no reason for the eye to travel to one stain over another. It was the same with the ashtray. The scorch on the base meant nothing. And though she could hide it away, get it out of the house – wouldn’t that simply draw attention to it? It was less incriminating to leave it right where it was… The hearth was brimming over with a new mess, from Sunday’s fires – that was good – but the ash-pail was still there, with those scraps of gingham and lumps of clinker in it, the latter looking like the sort of greasy black nuggets one might find at the bottom of a roasting-dish. But those, at least, she could take care of. She carefully carried the pail downstairs, put on an apron and galoshes, then picked her way down the muddy garden to the ash-heap. She didn’t rush the job. She took her time as she stirred the clinker into the slurry, not caring if a neighbour should chance to look out and see her – for, after all, emptying ash-pails was the sort of chore she did every day. Even when she spotted an unburned scrap of yellow fabric in the grey her nerve remained strong. She fetched a spade, made a cut in the earth at the side of a rosemary bush, pushed the yellow fragment into it, and sealed up the ground.

Next she got a dustpan and brush, and then a bucket of soapy water, and went over the treads of the stairs, the floor of the hall, the passage, the kitchen – the route that she and Lilian had taken with Leonard’s body. Again she worked slowly and methodically, doing far more than she needed to, moving the pieces of hall furniture out of their places, even hauling the oak coat-stand away from the wall in order to get behind and beneath it. Near the threshold of the kitchen she found a single rusty splash that she thought had probably come from Lilian rather than from Leonard, and in the shadowiest corner of the passage she discovered the neat half of a black button that might, just possibly, have got tugged from one of Leonard’s cuffs as she had dragged him down the stairs. But the splash was easily wiped away, and the button she carried out to the kitchen stove along with the rest of the contents of the dustpan. She hesitated about throwing it in, though. If the police should ever take it into their heads to go through the ashes… In the end, remembering how she had buried the scrap of material, she pushed the button into the earth of the potted aspidistra that, for as long as she could remember, had sat on the largest of the hall tables beside the brass dinner-gong. The police would never look there, surely?