A Vision of Loveliness

Part Three





Chapter 24


Your allure is a science. Take control of your

movements. Make them slow. Make them

graceful. Monitor every pose, every gesture,

so that nothing is ever left to chance.





The policemen were quite chummy first off, sitting the pair of them down on a settee by the main door and telling them not to worry. The central heating went off at eleven and it was freezing in the foyer. There was an old paraffin stove behind the porter’s desk but its heat didn’t seem to reach any further than his knees.

One of the upholstery pins on the settee had torn a tiny hole in Jane’s stocking and she could feel the ladder tickling its way up the side of her leg every time she moved.

When the ambulance men had finished outside one of them came over and asked if they were all right and was either of them a relation? He stank of disinfectant. That and the smell of floor polish and the dusty spray of plastic carnations in the vase on the front desk made Jane feel like she was in hospital. He asked again if either of them had been hurt in the crash.

‘We’re both fine,’ insisted Suzy in her very best hockey-captain tones, ‘completely unscathed.’

Unless you counted the bruised feeling across the chest from those rotten safety straps, thought Jane, but she said nothing.

‘Your hand’s like ice.’

He walked back to the desk to say something to one of the patrol-car policemen then drove away in the ambulance. No need for the siren.

The nosey old bitch on the ground floor had been woken up by the crash but she’d missed the ambulance coming and going because of the time it took to get her curlers out and change into her best housecoat (quilted nylon, much too long on her). She said they ought to have hot, sweet tea, like in the Blitz. It wasn’t proper tea, though. It was that perfumed gnat’s piss they all pretended to like. Very friendly all of a sudden but she served it in the kitchen china just the same and she didn’t offer any to the policemen.

One of them came over. Did either of them know the deceased and where did his family reside? Reside. Pillock. Then he went back over to the porter’s desk to arrange for some poor sod from the Putney branch to wake Old Mother Hullavington with the glad tidings.

‘What the bloody hell happened to Henry?’ whispered Jane.



Henry had been watching the whole thing from the sitting-room window upstairs while he was trying to get through to the wife. Once he’d seen the girls safely out of the car he sloped off down the fire escape to the garage where he kept the Bentley. The A30 was clean as a whistle and he was back in Virginia Water by midnight. Penelope was alone in the house when he got back, having waited up with a bottle of Cointreau. Penelope wanted to know what time he called this so he called it half past ten – just in case he needed an alibi.



The phone on the desk rang while the policemen were outside inspecting the front of the Volvo. Jim the porter answered it, nodded and yes-sirred a few times then signalled to Suzy who had started to cry. Whoever it was didn’t have a lot to say and she was back on the settee before the policemen had even noticed her get up.

‘Was that him?’ whispered Jane.

‘He wasn’t here, all right? He’ll sort everything out.’ Suzy spoke very quietly, without moving her lips.

It was all shaping up like a tragic accident – Careless Driving at a pinch – until the police started taking statements from people and Jim the porter told them he’d seen the car deliberately accelerate into the wall. Thanks, Jim. And then the other nosey old bitch – the one who had the flat on the other side of the main door where the crash was – went and stuck her oar in. Mrs Kowalski, her name was. Foreign.

Mrs Kowalski had seen the whole bloody thing and she’d tottered out into the front hall and started shooting her mouth off. She had a ginger wig stuck on all anyhow and a white space at the front of her head where her face ought to have been: no eyebrows; no eyelashes; no cheeks; no lips. Without Max Factor there was nobody there. They took her statement over by the porter’s desk but she was stone deaf so you could hear every word. Young women in motor cars at all hours driving. Decent people asleep. And not the first time flat fifty-two a nuisance made. The policeman’s ears pricked up. What flat number did she say? He finished taking her statement and was just nipping out to have a word with the radio bloke in the police car when he heard the clang of a tin pail on the tarmac outside. While he’d been busy with Mrs K, Jim the porter had wandered off to his little glory hole under the main stairs to get a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Jeyes Fluid and had calmly trotted outside to wash all that mess off the stonework. What was his game? More to the point, what were the CID going to say?

The CID pulled up a few minutes later in a shiny black Humber. The detective sergeant had a few words with the constable then strolled over to the settee. Carefully combed hair, dandruff (if allowed to run riot, dandruff can even lead to baldness), shiny blue suit. Married. He even smelled married: a nasty mixture of pipe tobacco and cough sweets and meat pie. Jane tried to picture the wife: a carrot-topped, pear-shaped, apple-cheeked housewife in a floral apron and K Skips baking bloody biscuits in Barnet.

Something about the magic number fifty-two had got them talking about accompanying them down to the station. No charge or anything. No taking down and using in evidence or any of that Dixon of Dock Green malarkey but they didn’t seem to have much choice about it just the same.

Suzy looked down at her blue velvet and then up at the copper.

‘The police station? Like this?’

Her voice had gone very Darjeeling all of a sudden and she’d tried to turn the charm up a notch or two, pursing her lips and batting her eyelashes down (to the frock) and back up again (to the detective) but those strokes didn’t cut much ice when your mascara was all down your face and you’d left most of your lipstick on the rim of a teacup. Jane surreptitiously wiped her lipstick on to a crusty old paper hanky she found in her jacket pocket. Crusty with what?

The policeman obviously hadn’t heard of dressing for the occasion.

‘Don’t try to be funny, miss. Just you go along with the sergeant here. We’ll take the other young lady in the Humber, Wilkins.’ It was Wilkins who had told Johnny Hullavington that the ambulance was on its way as his life’s blood trickled neatly down a nearby drain.

They might not let them change into formal daywear but they couldn’t very well refuse to let them go to the bloody toilet. Mrs Kowalski’s toilet. Suzy was gone nearly twelve minutes – time to put a whole new face on – but it wasn’t the brightest idea she’d ever had. Mrs Kowalski only had a thirty-watt bulb in her bathroom and the thick peachy powder and Plum Crazy lipstick were much too after six. And she’d got lipstick on her teeth.

Jane was in and out in half the time. She peeled off her eyelashes and left them in the soap dish then washed off what was left of her make-up. No sense looking like a slag. She quickly took Sergio’s bracelet off and looped it round the middle of her bra. Might give the filth the wrong idea. When she came out Mrs K was hovering in the hallway with a pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of Parazone, ready to disinfect the toilet seat. Cheek.