"Then have the house searched again. If Arrowood left a copy there, we might have missed it the first time round." And if he had, she wondered as she rang off, had his wife seen it? What had prompted Dawn to contact Sean Arrowood?
Thoughtfully, she continued down the hill to Elgin Crescent. Otto's Café appeared empty. There were, however, still lunch dishes on a few of the tables, and a lovely, garlicky smell emanated from the kitchen.
Before Gemma could call out, Otto appeared from the back, wiping his hands on his apron. "Inspector! This is an unexpected pleasure."
"Hullo, Otto," replied Gemma, inordinately pleased at her reception.
"Can I get you something? It was quiet today- the customers are either on holiday or still recovering from their Christmas dinners- and I have made a nice borscht."
"Thank you, no. I had something at the office. Is Wesley not here?" she asked, only then realizing how much she'd been looking forward to seeing the young man.
"No. He takes a few days at Christmas, as the business is slow, and he has family visiting."
"It's just that I wanted to thank him again for bringing our Christmas tree- and you, Otto, for contributing your van."
"It was successful, then? Wesley was very pleased with himself as Father Christmas."
"Otto, there is another reason I'm here. I wanted to talk to you about Karl Arrowood, if you don't mind." She'd had an officer check Otto's whereabouts at the time of Karl's murder: He had taken his daughters to their grandparents' for Christmas Eve festivites.
"I have heard the news," Otto replied somberly. He pulled out a chair for her and took another himself. "You know, I had thought for a long time that nothing would please me more than that man's death, but now I find it is not so. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, I cannot tell. It also means I was wrong in accusing him of murdering his young wife, and for that I'm sorry."
"You knew Karl for a long time. Everyone talks about his successes, but no one ever mentions where he came from, or how he got started in his business. Did he grow up here in Notting Hill?"
"He never talked about these things himself, even when I worked with him. But I know a little from the neighborhood gossip, and from my mother and her circle of friends. It was their way of making themselves at home in a strange country, to learn everything they could about everyone," Otto added with a smile. "Karl's family was German. They came here as refugees right after the war, so that Karl was born here, in Notting Hill. I don't think he ever considered himself to be anything other than English."
"They were Jewish?"
"Yes. His father was a grocer, if my memory serves me. They would have had little, and Karl certainly had no exposure to fine things through his upbringing. But the antiques market was growing rapidly in those days, and I always assumed he had worked for a stallholder or a dealer as a boy." He gave a shrug of regret. "I'm sorry I can't tell you more."
It occurred to Gemma that she knew someone else in the neighborhood who had come to England as a German refugee just after the war. And it was, as Otto had said, a close-knit community. Was it stretching probability too much to think more information might be forthcoming from a different quarter?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Portobello Road, with its shoppers, tourists and those merely hanging out, offered stimulating subject-matter for photographers and artists. The flea market attracted Peter Blake, a pop artist who decorated his paintings with badges, labels, bits of signs, medals and paraphernalia. He is best known for designing the record sleeve of the Beatles' album 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'
– Whetlor and Bartlett,
from Portobello
It began as a dream. He was alone in the dark, cold and frightened, his stomach cramping with hunger. He lay in a bed that was damp and stank, and he desperately wanted his mother.
The dream moved on in interminable dreamtime… hours… days, he couldn't tell. Then suddenly his mother was there in the room with him, but she didn't answer when he called out to her. The room spun and he saw her clearly, sprawled on the floor beside the other bed, her red dress hiked up, one delicate sandaled foot hung in a fold of the counterpane.
Now he was out of his bed, creeping across the room on his hands and knees. He touched her. Her skin was cold; her breath came in labored snorts. She smelled of the stuff that came in bottles, and of the other… the sweet, sickly smell that made his throat close with dread. Tonight he would not be able to wake her.
It was only when he reached his bed again that he acknowledged the smell and the dampness were his fault. His mother would kill him when she woke, she had told him so, and he had no doubt that she meant it. Terror washed over him and he scrabbled at the wet bedclothes, willing himself desperately to disappear-
Alex woke sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping.
Where the hell had that dream come from? He couldn't remember having it before, but it was all horribly, intimately familiar to him in a way he didn't understand.
He'd had dreams occasionally where he had inhabited another person, another body, like an actor in a film. But he had been the little boy in the dream, or the little boy had been him.
Shivering now, he wrapped the duvet round his shoulders and stumbled into the kitchen. Taking a mug of hot, sweet tea into the sitting room, he sat on the floor, swathed in the comforter, watching wretchedly for the first intimation of dawn at his garden window.
Then the dream began again, and this time he knew he was awake. There was a man in the bedroom; he could smell the tobacco and the rank sweat. The man and his mother were together in her bed, making the sounds he couldn't bear to hear. He stuffed his fingers in his ears to shut out the noise, digging until he loosened the scabs from the last time.
There was blood, he was drowning in it, and through the haze he saw the blue swell of his mother's vein and the springing drop of scarlet as the needle went in.
After that she went away from him, her eyes skittering across his face as if it were a strange landscape. Nothing he said or did could reach her, and he knew that she went away because she did not love him.
As the memory faded into the pearly mauve of daybreak at his window, Alex saw that the dream-child's logic was flawed- but he also knew that logic mattered not at all.
All Saints Road was not a particularly cheerful place early on a Friday morning, Kincaid decided as he and Doug Cullen got out of the car in front of Gavin Farley's surgery. Most of the shops and businesses were closed, their windows covered by the rolling metal gratings that marked London as a cosmopolitan city. Nor did the rutted, mottled mixture of snow and slush lining the gutters help matters.
"That's Farley's car." Cullen indicated a maroon Astra parked at least a foot from the curb.
"I hope his veterinary skills are an improvement on his driving."
"Maybe that's why he leaves the Mercedes to his wife," Cullen replied with a grin as he swung open the surgery door.
Bryony Poole stood at the reception desk, a chart in her hand. She looked up at Kincaid with an instant smile of recognition that made him wish with a pang of guilt that he'd never thought of her as a suspect, but the information Cullen had dredged up about her relationship with a former lover had given him no choice but to see the interview through.
"Superintendent, isn't it?" Bryony said. "Can I help you? Gavin- Mr. Farley- is with a client at the moment, but I can tell him you're here."
"It's you we wanted a word with, actually, Miss Poole. Is there somewhere we could talk? This is Sergeant Cullen, by the way."
She nodded at Cullen, her expression more wary now. "I'm rather busy this morning, I'm afraid. And I really don't know what else I can tell you." Glancing towards the exam room that presumably held her boss, she added, "This has been awkward enough for me as it is…"