Quick and the Dead Read online

  There was still the baby. Determined not to display my mortification at being rejected, I resigned from the force, hating the possibility of running into Jack the Love Rat, Jack the Shit, almost as much as I hated leaving a job I cared passionately about and wanted to go on doing until I retired. And then a month after Jack had moved in with his lover, a beautician with her own salon, I woke in the night, my back aching, dull cramps in my stomach which gradually morphed into a severe abdominal pain. I had been experiencing discomfort, especially in the lower back, for the past three or four weeks, for which my GP had prescribed a mild painkiller. So that night, I took two tablets and went back – eventually – to sleep. I woke to find my bed drenched with what I at first took to be perspiration but – on pushing back the covers – saw, with horror, was blood. I knew at once what it was. I called the hospital and an ambulance was sent immediately. They took every possible care but they couldn’t save the baby. They told me he was a boy. I was completely crushed. Emotionally broken.

  So there I was, in my late twenties, unemployed, unmarried and childless. And very unhappy. The maisonette flat I had once shared with Jack and from which I could not afford to move (at least I had been able to keep it as part of the divorce settlement) was almost too strong a reminder of happier times. I changed. I grew a cynical carapace over my vulnerable heart, determined that I would never again be hurt the way Jack had hurt me. My friends and family wondered aloud where the real Alex had gone. I shrugged. Murdered, was the answer. Dead and buried. Burned in the ashes of a faithless love.

  With nothing much else to do, I decided to carry on putting together a book similar to one I had been given by a godmother when I was ten. It had contained paintings by famous artists, with a fictional story woven around the people inside each picture. I’d been trying to produce something similar for my coming child. When I lost him, it gave me a purpose, something to concentrate on, something to divert my mind. I called it Tell Me a Story. A small local publisher took it and had a gratifying success with it.

  I started another book, along the same lines. Given the wealth of material out there, I decided to concentrate on pictures of babies, or parents and babies. I talked about it to the man in the local bookshop, who was very encouraging. ‘It’s a terrific idea,’ he said. ‘And unusual. You shouldn’t have any difficulty selling a concept like that.’ He’d smiled at me. ‘I’ll order a dozen for the shop.’

  I called it Baby, Baby. A way of easing my pain. Distancing myself from Jack’s defection. The man at the bookshop – Sam Willoughby – was right. Months later, when the book was finally put together, the same small local publisher who had produced Tell Me a Story had enthusiastically taken it on, offered a reasonable advance, and asked for more of the same, perhaps losing the fictional element and gearing it towards adults. ‘Gorgeous painting on the right-hand side,’ he’d said. ‘Beautifully presented text on the opposite page.’ His face had gleamed with fervour. ‘Oh, I can see it clearly.’ Unfortunately, shortly after I’d signed the contract, his company went belly-up and he disappeared to Scotland to take over his father’s farm.

  But at least I had finally felt a lifting of the murk which had surrounded me since my divorce and subsequent miscarriage. And then I came across Helena.

  Barnsfield House, headquarters of ArtWorld Books, lay down a rural lane deep in the Sussex countryside. It was an unassuming country house, surrounded by woods and fields. I pulled up in front of the place, heart sinking a little as I registered the fact that Helena’s ancient black Humber wasn’t there. I shook my head. Typical Helena.

  ‘Please don’t be late,’ I said aloud. ‘At least, not too late.’ Through the windscreen I could see a piece of crumbling wall, not connected to anything else, which I judged to be pretty ancient. I could also see a small burial ground along one side of the house, complete with yew trees, mossy headstones and carved granite crosses. Kind of gloomy, I thought. I remembered a visit to Haworth and the Brontë family’s Parsonage, and the way they practically lived in a cemetery. When I have fears that I should cease to be … I hoped Mr Nichols would not turn out to be some lugubrious Dickensian character with a high stiff collar, a dark suit and a waistcoat embellished with egg stains.

  After checking my appearance in the mirror, I climbed out of my car, thanking the weather gods that the rain-snow-sleet had abated for a few seconds. I ran across a courtyard of sandy yellow gravel into a porch with gothic windows and oaken seats on either side. I was just about to press the brass-encircled bell at the side of the front door when it opened.

  ‘Alex Quick! How very nice to see you.’ Hand out, a man stepped forwards. ‘I’m a huge admirer.’

  ‘I take it you’re Mr Nichols.’

  ‘Indeed. But I must insist that you call me Cliff.’ He stepped back. ‘Do please come on in.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He stared beyond me. ‘And your partner?’

  ‘Helena’s coming across from Canterbury. I’m afraid she’s not the best timekeeper in the world, but she should be here any moment,’ I said, as confidently as I could. We stepped into a panelled hall with various doors giving off it.

  ‘This way.’ Nichols ushered me into a library full of books and ancient oriental carpets. A plump woman stood at a large round table in the middle of the room, with a heavy silver tray in front of her which held coffee pots and cups and jugs of warm milk.

  ‘This is Elaine, my … uh … chief assistant,’ Nichols said.

  And what else …? I nodded at her. Smiled.

  ‘Weren’t there supposed to be two of you?’ she asked.

  ‘There were, but my collaborator may be a few minutes late.’ Inwardly, I cursed Helena. This meeting was so important. It could determine the next few years of our lives.

  ‘Let’s have coffee while we wait,’ Nichols said.

  The three of us settled at another table, a long rectangular one of centuries-polished oak, with papers laid out as though for a board meeting.

  ‘And let me explain about this place,’ he said, ‘before you start wondering …’

  About what?

  ‘… I inherited this house from my godfather, lock stock and barrel, five years ago, and it seemed the ideal place to run a small business from, with London rents and house prices getting more and more absurd. So down we came. Me, Elaine, our secretary Shan …’

  ‘Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all,’ put in Elaine. She laughed loudly. I laughed too, though I couldn’t see it was all that funny.

  ‘And it suits us down to the ground,’ Nichols finished.

  Again I nodded. There was something about the two of them which I couldn’t put my finger on. Something off-kilter – so much so that I wasn’t even sure whether it was a positive something or a negative one. If I had been interviewing him as a witness in a crime scene, I wondered what questions I might have asked him.

  Over the rim of my coffee cup, I studied him as he chatted to Elaine about a book they were in the middle of producing. Nice-looking, youngish, somewhere in the mid-forties, wearing the standard country-dweller’s uniform of corduroys, a checked shirt and a sweater. Short-cut brown hair, hazel eyes, some kind of dark birthmark beneath his left eye. I tried to analyse what exactly had set my antennae quivering but failed to come up with anything convincing. Was it because he had greeted me by name, when he’d not met me before and I might easily have been Helena for all he knew? That didn’t hold water. He looked like a man who did his homework, so he could have found our photographs from various sources. Was it because he’d insisted that I call him Cliff? There was no need for him to insist, since I was quite ready to call him anything he pleased. And why should he presume that I might wonder about his house – why offer any explanation at all when it was none of my business in the first place?

  I wished that Helena would get here. Even though I was the practical one who dealt with contracts and negotiations, drove bargains, hard or otherwise, demanded concessions I knew we wouldn’t get, in order to be
conceded ones we might not otherwise have been offered, I also suggested paintings, researched pictures. But I wanted my collaborator at my side. Especially since Helena was adept at coming up with the pertinent question which could make all the difference to a contract.

  A grandfather clock in one corner of the room wheezed and puffed and finally chimed twice. The half-hour. Where on earth was Helena?

  ‘Would you mind if I tried to call my partner?’ I asked apologetically, wishing that the word hadn’t now taken on the suggestion of Significant Other. ‘My business partner, that is. She should be on her way, but perhaps there’s been a pile-up on the motorway. And she did mention she was suffering from a bit of an upset stomach.’ Not a lie, not really. She’d certainly mentioned such a thing a week or three ago.

  ‘Or maybe she’s stuck behind a herd of cows.’ Nichols laughed. ‘Happens quite a lot round here. Drives our staff mad.’

  ‘Or the road conditions are too difficult, thanks to the weather,’ said Elaine.

  ‘Yes, we did kind of wonder if you would ring to cancel or postpone.’

  What? And lose the opportunity to strike while the iron was hot? No way. I pressed in the numbers of Helena’s mobile and listened to it ring until the answerphone message came on. I tried her home number, too, just in case she hadn’t yet left for some reason. Again I was sent directly to her answerphone. What on earth was the wretched woman up to? I looked across the table at the other two. ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry. I hate wasting your time like this, so shall we just get on with it?’

  Over the next couple of hours, we hammered out an agreement for three (Yay! I thought) more anthologies. Nichols even mooted the possibility of a TV series. ‘I’ve got contacts,’ he said. ‘And I think it could go. Like that nun who did a series on art. Very popular … the Singing Nun, was it?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said vaguely.

  ‘You’re confusing Sister Wendy talking about art, and the Singing Nun from the Sixties, dear,’ Elaine said crisply. ‘Probably before your time.’ She gazed at him fondly.

  ‘The point is, we’re thinking of maybe creating a subsidiary company …’

  ‘Barnsfield Enterprises, something like that,’ said Elaine. ‘Which would handle screen projects for us.’

  I could immediately visualize it. ‘A TV series sounds really great,’ I said.

  ‘Fronted by Doctor Drummond,’ Cliff said. ‘Not that you yourself wouldn’t be good, but she’s got the academic reputation. And the voice.’

  ‘It could be a real success for us,’ said Elaine.

  ‘People really do like to think that they’re getting something a bit classy,’ Nichols continued. ‘Not all the time, mind you. And let’s face it, Coronation Street is always going to win out over Corot. But the idea definitely has legs. Elaine …’ He turned to her. ‘Find out what you can about the possibilities, if there’s any chance at all.’

  Another slightly off-piste remark from Clifford, since they must already have done so. Elaine made a note on her electronic pad. I thought that if anyone could swing a TV deal, it would be her. I wondered if by any chance she was the mother he had mentioned on the phone when setting up this meeting: she was certainly the right age. And I was by no means the only person to call my parents by their Christian names.

  I had stopped feeling embarrassed about Helena’s absence. Instead, I was starting to worry. What could possibly have happened to her? Asking permission first, I called Helena’s phone numbers again, with the same results as before. Where the hell was she? However hard I tried, I could no longer prevent my cool professional persona from starting to slip.

  Eventually I stood up. ‘This has all been very exciting and, I believe, productive. Please let me have a summary of what you feel we’ve achieved today, and I’ll do the same and send it to you. An extremely useful discussion all round.’ I tried for a rueful smile. ‘All I need to do now is track down my vanished partner and find out what she’s been up to. I know she’ll be as enthusiastic as I am.’

  I said goodbye to Elaine and followed Nichols back to the tiled entrance hall. He retrieved my coat, gave me a polite buss on the cheek, watched as I climbed into my car, turned on the ignition and, making a wide circle on the gravel, drove off. Turning left at the stone gate posts, I continued down the lane until I reached a lay-by, where I pulled in. What the hell was Helena up to? I’d given her the address several times, and she knew my mobile number. I used my phone to locate the numbers of the hospitals which lay along the route Helena would have taken from Canterbury, then started to call them. Half an hour later, I had established that none had admitted a Helena Drummond that morning. Nor any other fifty-year-old female.

  TWO

  The sky grew darker as I drove back to my flat. Bursts of sleet spattered the windscreen from time to time; gusts of wind rocked the car. I grew increasingly steamed as I drove, so much so that instead of carrying on, I impulsively turned off the M25 towards Canterbury. More and more enraged, I was conscious too of feeling aggrieved. I had worked hard for this meeting, been sweet when I didn’t feel like it (I don’t do sweet). I had smiled, nodded and subdued my personality, something I hated to do. And then Helena, for whatever reason, had bloody well failed to show up, leaving me to handle the whole deal on my own. Which I had done pretty well, in my humble opinion, so much so that Cliff Nichols had not only accepted my explanation of Helena’s absence (possible food poisoning), but had more or less promised to send Drummond & Quick a three-book contract within the next two weeks, on distinctly favourable terms.

  I drove around the outer ring-road of the ancient city. Through the gloomy afternoon, the floodlit spire-crowned blocks of the cathedral stood above the grey roofs, invoking, as always, the ghosts of Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims on their way from London, the robust Wyf of Bath forever banging on about something, the parfit gentle Knight and his son the Squire, chivalrously paying attention.

  Helena’s house was in a pretty village two or three miles outside the city. As I drew closer, fury continued to build inside me. When she hadn’t answered her phone early that morning, I had taken it for granted that it was because she was already on her way to our appointment. But maybe she had seen the call was from me and decided not to answer. The lazy cow had probably just stayed in bed with a book, or with the hangover she was undoubtedly nursing after eating out with her friends last night. Or maybe she’d gone home after the concert with some man and not yet surfaced. If that proved to be the case, I wasn’t sure I could answer for my actions. And of course I dismissed without a second’s thought her lurid stories of kidnappers and stalkers.

  I screeched to a stop in the fortuitously empty space in front of her place, parking erratically just behind her big old Humber. Seeing it there, reinforcing my assumption that she hadn’t even left the house that morning, I tore off one of my gloves and furiously jabbed at the doorbell, holding my finger in place. My other hand curled into a fist as I waited. ‘Come on, bitch,’ I muttered, through gritted teeth. ‘Open the fucking door!’

  But there was no response from inside the house. I stepped back into the road and looked up at the bedroom windows. As I had suspected, the curtains were still closed. Long ago she and I had exchanged keys to each other’s places, in case one or other was away and access to papers and books relevant to our joint work was needed. So in the end, after more fruitless knocking and ringing, I fished out my key ring, found the key to Helena’s front door and stepped into the narrow red-painted hall. Everything looked as it normally did: the tall Chinese vases on either side of an antique console table set below a huge gold-framed mirror; the coat-rack laden with fur-lined jackets, rainbow-striped ponchos, knitted coats in brilliant colours; the stag’s head hanging crookedly above the door into the sitting room with a tam o’shanter dangling from its antlers; the vividly coloured rugs on the floor, for once lying flat and undisturbed on the Victorian cream-and-terracotta tiles. No obvious signs of anything out of the ordinary.

>   ‘Helena!’ I screamed. I listened, but there was no answering call. She couldn’t seriously still be in bed, could she?

  ‘Helena,’ I yelled again, ‘I’m coming up, ready or not.’

  As I mounted the stairs, my ex-copper instincts were beginning to kick in. Despite the apparent calm of the hallway, the lack of any signs of disruption, I was feeling uneasy. As I climbed the carpeted stairs, past piles of books, an overflowing work-basket, clean, folded laundry, a red shoe with a four-inch-high glitter heel, I became more and more convinced that something was desperately wrong. Had Helena had some kind of seizure? Had she slipped in the shower and cracked her head against the edge of the bath? Had she tripped while getting dressed? The hairs at the back of my neck rose in a primeval awareness of danger. Three steps down from the upper landing, eyes level with the floor, I stopped. I smelled the unmistakable, all-too-familiar metallic whiff of blood. Dried blood. Peering through the banister rails, I looked straight into Helena’s womb-like bedroom: rose-pink walls, an armchair covered in cherry-coloured linen, dark-red carpet overlaid with several more bright rugs, a cerise-swirled duvet dragging from the bed to the floor, a bulb still burning under a strawberry-patterned shade, even though it had now gone four-thirty in the afternoon.

  And …

  I grabbed the railings … oh, my God! Oh no! I could see a naked foot dangling over the end of the bed. The manicured toenails were painted with gold polish, which glinted in the glow from the bedside lamps. For a moment I stood paralysed, then I ran up the last three steps, past the gilded life-size Fu Dogs, Chinese sentry lions which stood on snarling guard outside the room, snatching up a heavy wrought-iron candlestick set just inside the door as I ran, in case …