26
I must look to my footing:
In such slippery ice-pavements men had need
To be frost-nail’d well, they may break their necks else…
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
It was fortunate that Strike still had the five hundred pounds in cash in his wallet that had been given him to cut up a teenage boy. He told the taxi driver to take him to Fulham Palace Road, home of Elizabeth Tassel, took note of the route as he travelled and would have arrived at her house in a mere four minutes had he not spotted a Boots. He asked the driver to pull up and wait, and re-emerged from the chemists shortly afterwards, walking much more easily with the aid of an adjustable stick.
He estimated that a fit woman might make the journey on foot in less than half an hour. Elizabeth Tassel lived further from the murder scene than Kathryn Kent but Strike, who knew the area reasonably well, was sure that she could have made her way through most residential backstreets while avoiding the attention of cameras, and that she might have avoided detection even with a car.
Her home looked drab and dingy on this bleak winter’s day. Another red brick Victorian house, but with none of the grandeur or whimsy of Talgarth Road, it stood on a corner, fronted by a dank garden overshadowed by overgrown laburnum bushes. Sleet fell again as Strike stood peering over the garden gate, trying to keep his cigarette alight by cupping it in his hand. There were gardens front and back, both well shielded from the public view by the dark bushes quivering with the weight of the icy downpour. The upper windows of the house looked out over the Fulham Palace Road Cemetery, a depressing view one month from midwinter, with bare trees reaching bony arms silhouetted into a white sky, old tombstones marching into the distance.
Could he imagine Elizabeth Tassel in her smart black suit, with her scarlet lipstick and her undisguised fury at Owen Quine, returning here under cover of darkness, stained with blood and acid, carrying a bag full of intestines?
The cold was nipping viciously at Strike’s neck and fingers. He ground out the stub of his cigarette and asked the taxi driver, who had watched with curiosity tinged with suspicion as he scrutinised Elizabeth Tassel’s house, to take him to Hazlitt Road in Kensington. Slumped in the back seat he gulped down painkillers with a bottle of water that he had bought in Boots.
The cab was stuffy and smelled of stale tobacco, ingrained dirt and ancient leather. The windscreen wipers swished like muffled metronomes, rhythmically clearing the blurry view of broad, busy Hammersmith Road, where small office blocks and short rows of terraced houses sat side by side. Strike looked out at Nazareth House Care Home: more red brick, church-like and serene, but with security gates and a lodge keeping a firm separation between those cared for and those who were not.
Blythe House came into view through the misty windows, a grand palace-like structure with white cupolas, looking like a large pinkish cake in the grey sleet. Strike had a vague notion that it was used as a store for one of the big museums these days. The taxi turned right into Hazlitt Road.
‘What number?’ asked the driver.
‘I’ll get out here,’ said Strike, who did not wish to descend directly in front of the house, and had not forgotten that he still had to pay back the money he was squandering. Leaning heavily on the stick and grateful for its rubber-coated end, which gripped the slippery pavement well, he paid the driver and walked along the street to take a closer look at the Waldegrave residence.
These were real townhouses, four storeys high including the basements, golden brick with classical white pediments, carved wreaths beneath the upper windows and wrought-iron balustrades. Most of them had been converted into flats. There were no front gardens, only steps descending to the basements.
A faintly ramshackle flavour had permeated the street, a gentle middle-class dottiness that expressed itself in the random collections of pot plants on one balcony, a bicycle on another and, on a third, limp, wet and possibly soon-to-be-frozen washing forgotten in the sleet.
The house that Waldegrave shared with his wife was one of the very few that had not been converted into flats. As he stared up at it, Strike wondered how much a top editor earned and remembered Nina’s statement that Waldegrave’s wife ‘came from money’. The Waldegraves’ first-floor balcony (he had to cross the street to see it clearly) sported two sodden deckchairs printed with the covers of old Penguin paperbacks, flanking a tiny iron table of the kind found in Parisian bistros.
He lit another cigarette and re-crossed the road to peer down at the basement flat where Waldegrave’s daughter lived, considering as he did so whether Quine might have discussed the contents of Bombyx Mori with his editor before delivering the manuscript. Could he have confided to Waldegrave how he envisaged the final scene of Bombyx Mori? And could that amiable man in horn-rimmed glasses have nodded enthusiastically and helped hone the scene in all its ludicrous gore, knowing that he would one day enact it?
There were black bin bags heaped around the front door of the basement flat. It looked as though Joanna Waldegrave had been having a comprehensive clear-out. Strike turned his back and contemplated the fifty windows, at a conservative estimate, that overlooked the Waldegrave family’s two front doors. Waldegrave would have had to have been very lucky not to be seen coming and going out of this heavily overlooked house.
But the trouble was, Strike reflected gloomily, that even if Jerry Waldegrave had been spotted sneaking into his house at two in the morning with a suspicious, bulging bag under his arm, a jury might take some persuading that Owen Quine had not been alive and well at the time. There was too much doubt about the time of death. The murderer had now had as long as nineteen days in which to dispose of evidence, a long and useful period.
Where could Owen Quine’s guts have gone? What, Strike asked himself, did you do with pounds and pounds of freshly severed human intestine and stomach? Bury them? Dump them in a river? Throw them in a communal bin? They would surely not burn well…
The front door of the Waldegraves’ house opened and a woman with black hair and heavy frown lines walked down the three front steps. She was wearing a short scarlet coat and looked angry.
‘I’ve been watching you out of the window,’ she called to Strike as she approached and he recognised Waldegrave’s wife, Fenella. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Why are you so interested in my house?’
‘I’m waiting for the agent,’ Strike lied at once, showing no sign of embarrassment. ‘This is the basement flat for rent, right?’
‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback. ‘No – that’s three down,’ she said, pointing.
He could tell that she teetered on the verge of an apology but decided not to bother. Instead she clattered past him on patent stilettos ill suited to the snowy conditions towards a Volvo parked a short way away. Her black hair revealed grey roots and their brief proximity had brought with it a whiff of bad breath stained with alcohol. Mindful that she could see him in her rear-view mirror, he hobbled in the direction she had indicated, waited until she had pulled away – very narrowly missing the Citroën in front of her – then walked carefully to the end of the road and down a side street, where he was able to peer over a wall into a long row of small private back gardens.
There was nothing of note in the Waldegraves’ except an old shed. The lawn was scuffed and scrubby and a set of rustic furniture sat sadly at its far end with a look of having been abandoned long ago. Staring at the untidy plot, Strike reflected gloomily on the possibility of lock-ups, allotments and garages he might not know about.
With an inward groan at the thought of the long, cold, wet walk ahead, he debated his options. He was nearest to Kensington Olympia, but it only opened the District line he needed at weekends. As an overground station, Hammersmith would be easier to navigate than Baron’s Court, so he decided on the longer journey.