Pleasure and a Calling Read online

  When Mr Mower called me into his office one morning to announce his retirement – along with the offer that I run the firm under his name for a small share – he was surprised when I said I’d have to think about it. He was even more surprised a few days later to find that I had the money to make him a generous counter-offer to purchase the firm outright. A shadow fell briefly over his face – as if, perhaps, I had gazumped his own idea, ungraciously seized my future before he could give it. But then he smiled. It was his turn to think about it, but he wasn’t going to refuse. In the end he insisted on a smaller sum but also that he remain for a time in the wings, to aid the transition. After a year, the Mowers sold up and moved to Spain, to be near their daughter and grandchildren, Heming’s was born, and all was happiness.

  I GAINED UNLAWFUL ENTRY into Abigail’s life a few minutes after I saw her leave for work the morning after the business with Mr and Mrs Sharp, her hair damp from the shower. I was surprised that she had been out on her usual run. Bumping her bicycle tyres down the front steps, she looked tired. No doubt she was anxious about her precious Douglas. Her last text to him was just after midnight. Perhaps she feared a last-minute reconciliation with his wife. I watched her cycle off, down the road, then dismount at the gap in the wall that led down to the river path.

  I had no doubt that this time the key would fit, though I paused to enjoy a moment of calm before turning it. Then I closed the door behind me, shut my eyes and inhaled, holding that first taste in my nostrils. Of course, it’s nothing more than molecular. But also how magical, especially at that time of day, when the slow lingering charge of a person is still in the air. It goes beyond the steaming aromas of morning – the mingling of coffee and shampoo and croissants. Here was Abigail in essence, arising from the rustle of clothes against her skin, the warmth from her bed, her spearmint breath, the brisk eruption of human dust in the simple tightening of a shoelace. Thus do we leave the signs of ourselves. Its seduction is narcotic. The dreamiest high, the thrill of newness. A fresh drug to try.

  When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was what I assumed to be Sharp’s pair of matching holdalls standing side by side in an unused breakfast room. Not wanting to spoil the day, I moved on, capturing each unfolding scene with my small camcorder. The front room was full of heavy furniture, a bow-legged coffee table, vases, clashing patterns. Upstairs was Abigail’s mother’s large room, heavy with dead smells, a good-sized guest room, a box room containing a single tubular-framed bed, and then … Abigail’s vast double with its light woods, girlish treasures, 1960s lamp and zebra-print rug, a desk, a laptop, the red curtains I had seen from the street glowing in the night, her mother’s ginger teddy. Here was her music docking station, her TV set, DVDs and bookshelves of novels and poetry, popular psychology and philosophy manuals and travel guides. This was still her living space, a teenage retreat she had moved back to as an adult. There were boxes yet to unpack. More books. More poetry, old university books. It was as though, after her mother’s death, she had not yet allowed herself to fully occupy the house. For now, I touched nothing, opened none of the drawers, searched for no diary or photographs or letters. This was not a day for greed but thanksgiving. Sometimes what you have is all you need. Having slayed dragons to be here, it was enough to be buried in the softness and earthy scents of her bed, its autumn leaf-patterned quilt left in a careless heap, the pillows creased and unshaken from her night’s sleep.

  O sweet, fragrant slumber!

  By the time Abigail returned I was safely above, locked into the mustard-painted attic, with its cherished junk of memories: board games, toys, a doll’s pram, a walnut-cased stand-up radio, boxes long ago marked with their contents; the careful repository of a family shrunk to one.

  I had unpacked, laid out my bedroll in an enclosing cell of heaped furniture, and raised the skylight blind to the starry blue heavens. I showed my moneybox key to the camera and cut my mark deep into a floorboard. She ate in the echoing kitchen (I was glad to discover that the gentlest jousting of knife and fork sounded through the house) and then came upstairs. Oh my. I lay quiet in the faintly starlit darkness as she moved around. I heard her speak (to whom?) on the phone. She listened to a radio talk programme. Perhaps she read a book, or sent one more anxious plea to Sharp’s voicemail or inbox. At some point she went to the bathroom and used an electric toothbrush. She coughed lightly. Her mattress creaked as she rolled over to turn off the lamp or set her alarm. Perhaps she cried a little. Who could be happier?

  I have had my moments of accident and adventure. I have filmed myself cowering in the dusty underspace of a bed while a man in a hurry to catch a train ironed a shirt in the same room. I have been illuminated without warning in the small back garden of a young woman after dark (I might as well tell you now that this was Zoe). My best moments have resembled feats of comic heroism. Imagine me, for example, at the Houths’ of Anders Close – flight from Florida due in at six, taxi booked for 7.15 to whisk them home for, what, 8.15, 8.30? I was up with the birds, showering, hoovering, zipping my weekend bag, enjoying a relaxed breakfast. I washed and dried my juice glass (I’d brought my own juice), bagged my rubbish, swept up the cake crumbs (a good slice from most of a Dundee stowed in the larder), cooled the kettle, scrubbed and replaced the cafetière. Bang on schedule, the taxi was at the kerb, children clamouring to be let in. As the front door opened, I left noiselessly from the conservatory at the rear, slipped into the garden shrubbery and through a narrow but well-used gap in the hedge that gave on to the hospital grounds (where I happen to know Mrs Houth works in an administrative capacity). I am generally scrupulous in making a clean exit, though on this occasion it pleased me to think of Mrs Houth halting in her steps while her husband struggled with the suitcases. ‘That’s odd,’ I imagined her saying. ‘Can you smell coffee?’ A small aromatic mystery getting smaller with each sniff of the air.

  Folly, dread, victory – all might sharpen the appetite. Abigail was a career first. I ate, drank, dreamed and breathed her. She was that newest drug, that highest ledge, the rarest butterfly, all in one. The full immersion of my most ardent imaginings. It lasted five days – I could not risk more before the discovery of Sharp’s body – but what days they were! During the day, I visited her at the library. I loved to watch her graceful movement along the aisles, her quick-moving hands as she worked at the desk. When circumstances allowed, I closed in and caught the trail of her perfume. She never looked at me once. It was perfect.

  I turned up as normal at the office, though it’s possible Katya or Zoe or Wendy might later have recalled (if asked, as they probably were) a greater sense of vigour about me in recent days and weeks. Zoe and I drove out to the retirement bungalows again with a contract to sign and Katya brought down the hammer on two properties that same day (a bottle of bubbly was duly cracked open at close of play, Zoe – revitalized, it seemed, after our misunderstanding – showing Josh how to ease out the cork without ‘prematurely spurting’, as she called it, making Josh grin and turn pink). It was Katya too – who knew nothing of the Sharps’ differences of opinion the previous Friday – who returned to speak to Mrs Sharp, value the house and prepare the documents, sending Josh in afterwards to take photographs.

  But meanwhile I barely thought of Sharp, staring up at the sun and the moon for those five days and nights in the Cooksons’ back garden. At the time, what happened to him seemed the obvious outcome of a larger necessity. If I thought about him, it was only to hate him for involving me in his death. At other moments I clearly saw it was his character that had been his undoing; that he had crossed a road that hadn’t asked to be crossed. I thought too (when I thought about him at all) about what had shaped his mood on the day we had first met. Perhaps he had already quarrelled with his wife about the dog, or with Abigail about his wife. Perhaps he had walked the dog to Abigail’s house only to be refused entry. Imagine his fury when he returned to find Barney’s shit on the rug! In such a confluence of events – even accepting my role in h
astening the opportunity to vent Sharp’s rage – Barney’s death was inevitable. The only surprise, I thought, was that the poor creature had lasted so long. The pity was that Abigail would never know what I had saved her from. And most of all, that’s what I was thinking when I thought about Sharp.

  Sometimes, as I remember it now, those five days were over in a moment. At other times they seem like the endless school holidays of childhood, or the innocent summers one imagines before the onslaught of war. My senses held themselves out to her, swaying and falling like tides under the magnet of the great moon goddess. And then in the drowsy, breathing darkness, I tumbled through memory into my mother’s bed. Here was her bathtime fragrance but also a rising sourness as she held my face to her belly. Can you hear? A brother or sister was inside her, where once I was. In the soft nest between the unyielding bed-clothes and my mother’s bare skin I heard and wondered at the nearness of this life and longed to be closer. But here it ended, an ear to the slow, pumping warmth. Here was love, eternal and pure. All I needed to do was listen and it was there.

  And then, standing behind the curtains with my piece of bread, or behind the wicker chair in the garden room, hearing their voices, sometimes urgent or shrill, I would take her words as treasures and in my sleep amplify them into giant-size, like the ones in my book of rhymes, the black letters ornate, seriffed and towering. I would worm between the letters themselves – crawl beneath the enclosing roof and walls of an A or an H – and have her close to me in my dreams. What became of the baby boy after mother was taken from us? That was one of the secrets kept from me by Aunt Lillian and my father, who stared ahead and said nothing.

  But love was here again, in a delicate balance, the unimpeachable Abigail, pure as a thought to hold safe in my head and never let go. Her pureness was in nearness, not in an embrace or a glance or in fond words. Here – even for five days – was something true and lasting. To expect more, to touch the prize and ask to be touched in return – to engage in full (and I knew this) – was an insidious sweet poison.

  Eventually I descended into her private things, her Morocco notebook – she wrote poems in lilac ink; here was her fountain pen – and her social network secrets, left open one morning on her laptop. Here were some of the photographs I had already seen. Her girls’ night out, I now saw with a jolt of recognition, was actually her book group, an arrangement of like minds round a table with bottles of wine, one of the women peeping coyly over the top of a paperback, her eyes flirtatious, showing off. Sharp was out of shot but present, his elegant fingers resting on the base of a wineglass, his chunky bracelet watch absorbing the light. In her Morocco notebook, Abigail had written:

  Beast

  Unseen (or so he thinks) beneath the painted ceiling dark of sky,

  he nightly blinks indifference here to God in code

  that only He can read (and that’s the joke),

  then dreams the tang of everyday desire.

  Beast II

  Was it my unkempt charm that caught your eye that night,

  or my impressive grasp of metre, length and rhyme

  that pleased your ear and lured you into sight,

  that you might catch my scent and touch my arm,

  and taste my cheek when it was almost time?

  Poetry, I admit, is the locked room to which my mind cannot quite be relied upon to find the key, but I read and reread with awe, and spoke the words as if sheer will and devotion would free the message within.

  One lunchtime I followed her to the small supermarket on the high street. At the library, she kept up appearances, but here she was defeated, sad and beautiful. She bought a tub of seafood, noodles, fruit and milk. In the evening, mingled with the spiralling sounds of eastern instruments, the smell wafted up to me like a feast in itself. In the morning I ate grapes and strawberries from her fridge. How I loved her.

  AS I SAID, IT WAS ZOE who broke the news, scandalized and amazed, her eyes wide with the duty of scandalizing and amazing the rest of us. The details were sketchy, based on gossip that had reached one of Zoe’s friends, who worked at the solicitors’ office in Sloughgate, and amounted to the fact that the unidentified body of a man had been found by a couple coming back from their holidays. ‘You’ll never guess who,’ she said, turning towards Katya with almost unseemly excitement.

  Katya stared back at her. ‘Oh my God, the Cooksons …’

  Zoe bit her lip, her eyes shining with incredulity.

  Katya turned to me. ‘Should we call them?’

  ‘I think not. Though this might get your sale moving.’

  The midday news on Two Counties added nothing, other than to report on the nervous state of Mrs Cookson, forty-six, a pharmacist, who had discovered the decomposing body on the patio of their luxury home on the couple’s return from ten days in the Seychelles. The police would not say if they were treating the death as suspicious or how the man had died.

  ‘Surely it must be a burglar,’ said Wendy. ‘What else would a strange man be doing in their garden?’

  ‘Well, I can’t just sit here,’ said Katya, standing up instead, and looking out on to the street with her arms folded. ‘You know what’s going to happen? They’re going to blame us for putting our sign up and inviting burglars into their house while they’re on holiday. Though, surely, it has to be someone who knew they were away.’

  The regional early-evening TV news had a reporter on the scene, or at least on the spot where the police had taped off the lane. They had found out that the house was for sale and had our Heming’s sign clearly in shot, with parked police vehicles just visible on the bend, their lights flashing unnecessarily. Eventually a police officer came on and reiterated the bald facts and appealed to anyone who might have seen anything unusual to come forward.

  By the next morning it seemed they were looking for the driver of a white 4×4 seen leaving the area the previous week. At the office Josh came rushing in to say that it was his driving instructor who had called in about the white car, and that he had now been interviewed on TV showing the exact spot where he had seen it.

  ‘Who Is Mystery Intruder?’ asked the Sentinel when it finally caught up with the news on Thursday. Nothing was said about the keys, though their reporter went into some detail about the face of the dead man having been half eaten away by foxes and crows, leading to speculation that in the absence of other information – no anxious friends or relatives had called to report a missing person – he might have to be identified by his dental records. By the time the Sentinel came out again a week later, the story had moved on somewhat. ‘Intruder Was Owner’s Patient’ blared the headline. And sure enough, in a twist that I might have expected (because how many top cosmetic dentists are there in a small town?), it turned out that Mr Cookson was himself able to identify Sharp’s teeth, having whitened them with laser treatment only a few months previously at a cost estimated by the paper at between £800 and £1,200. ‘Plot Thickens’ ran a subsidiary headline above a gaudy picture of Sharp taken at one of the events at Warninck’s. The caption described him as a local married man and part-time Cambridge professor.

  And now, of course, everything changed.

  BY NOW OUR FOR SALE SIGN was standing outside the Sharps’ house as well as the Cooksons’ so I could hardly be surprised when a pair of plainclothes policemen turned up at the office with their routine questions. I was able to confirm that I was the owner of the firm and, yes, I had indeed visited the Sharps’ property recently (Wendy’s note was in the diary) and spoken to Mrs Sharp herself. Mr Sharp had not been present.

  ‘And how did Mrs Sharp seem, sir?’

  ‘Distressed,’ I said. ‘She had injured her hand.’

  ‘And did she say how she had injured it?’

  ‘In a disagreement with her husband, she said. The evening before. I think she said she threw a cup at him. Perhaps more than one. She had been to the hospital.’

  It seemed helpful to tell them what she had told me, which I guessed was wh
at they wanted to hear. Wendy brought coffee, shot a worried look at the two men in what looked like matching suits, one with a tattoo on his hand, and closed my door gently behind her. The younger of the officers made notes and watched as I answered, occasionally coming up with questions of his own. Had I ever met Mr Sharp previously?

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘Do you know a Mr Graham Buxton?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Is he on television?’

  The officer eyed me for signs of impertinence. ‘He works for one of your rivals – Worde & Hulme? He visited the Sharps on the Friday night and said that you were waiting outside, and that he spoke to you.’

  ‘Ah, that would be correct. I didn’t know his name. But, yes, it was he who told me the Sharps were in some disagreement.’

  ‘Do you mean a fight?’

  ‘A row, certainly. So I decided to call and suggest that we postpone till the next morning. I left a message on their answering machine. I imagine it’s still there if you check with Mrs Sharp.’

  The two men looked at each other, as if to conclude their business here, but the senior man had another question. ‘I gather you’re also handling the sale at number one Eastfield Lane – the Cooksons’ house?’

  ‘That’s true. Are you in the market, Inspector?’

  He smiled thinly. ‘It’s Sergeant, sir. Detective Sergeant. And I’m afraid it’s out of my league. Do you happen to have keys to the property?’

  I buzzed Wendy. ‘Could you ask Katya to pop in, please?’

  Katya arrived.

  ‘Katya, do we have keys to the Cooksons’ place?’

  She looked uncomfortably at the two men and then at me. ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Heming.’