"Smoke, do you?"
"No, I don't," said Mix virtuously.
"Drink?"
"Not much. Maybe four or five units a week."
That would have been little more than a single bottle of wine. The doctor looked at him suspiciously. Exercise, a fat freediet, tablets were prescribed and no salt.
"Come back and see me in two weeks' time-you don't want to be a diabetic by the time you're forty, do you?"
Blood pressure could be raised by anxiety, Mix had read somewhere. Well, he'd had plenty of anxiety recently. The doctor's admonitions had brought on a headache and a queasyfeeling. He'd call head office, tell them he wasn't well and gohome. Maybe he'd got old Chawcer's flu. The sun was dazzlinglybright today, for once lighting up this gloomy house, showing up the dust that lay everywhere and the cobwebs dangling from defunct hanging lamps and bem:imed moldings on the ceilings. Someone had opened the downstairs windows and all the curtains were drawn back. He opened a door he had never touched before and found himself looking into a vast room with a dining table down the middle, twelve chairs arranged around it and oil paintings on the walls of dead deer and rabbits, ugly old women in crinolines and cows in fields.
On the first landing he met a woman he hadn't seen before, and he immediately thought, she must be the one Reggie hadn't managed to destroy, old Chawcer's daughter. But she was too old for that and she introduced herself as Queenie Winthrop, smiling and for some reason fluttering her eyelashes.
"Poor darling Gwendolen is very poorly indeed, Mr. Cellini. She has a temperature of over a hundred degrees. And that doctor won't come until tomorrow afternoon. I call it a.disgrace."
Mix, who had grown up measuring degrees in Celsius, thought she had made a mistake. "What could you expect at her age? "Shame," he said.
"A shame is just what it is. These doctors should be ashamed.
Now, if you can just make her a cup of tea in the morning, I or Mrs. Fordyce will be in by eight-thirty. We have a key."
"Me?" said Mix feebly.
"That's right. If you'll be so kind. I don't know who will let that wretched doctor in but one of us will manage it somehow."
"Well, I can't," said Mix, escaping upstairs, and for once forgetting to look out for Reggie
He sniffed. It seemed to him that he could smell it out here.That might be in his head too. How did you know which things were real and which your imagination? Still, he wouldn't go in there this evening. He'd think, make a plan. It was just after eight when Ed phoned. Mix wished he hadn't answered it because Ed would only start again on how he'd let him down. But instead he was asking for bygones to be bygones. He shouldn't have blown his top like that. His excuse was that he wasn't really over his flu and still feeling under the weather.
"There's a lot of it about," Mix said, thinking of oldChawcer.
"Yeah, and it's not only that. Me and Steph are having problems getting a mortgage."
He went on and on about this flat they were hoping to buy,calculating their joint incomes, Steph's chances of promotion,and what would happen if she fell pregnant.
"You'll have to see she doesn't." Mix had always found it difficult, practically impossible, to apologize. Admitting he waswrong seemed to him the ultimate humiliation. He couldn'tsay he was sorry but he had to say something. "Feel like going for a drink?" he hazarded. "Maybe tonight?"
"Yeah, well, I can't tonight. Sun in Splendour at eight tomorrow? And a word to the wise, Mix, eh? They're getting very hot under the collar about you at head office. I just thought I'd give you a hint."
Mix nearly forgot about old Chawcer's tea in the morning. He hardly ever drank the stuff himself, but he kept a packet of teabags next to the coffee jar and when he saw it he remembered. He'd have to take the sugar down too in case she took it.
She didn't. That was the first thing she said to him after he knocked and went in. "You need not have brought that, Mr.Cellini. I don't take sugar." Nothing about how kind of him. No "Good morning." Her voice was weak and she kept coughing. As she struggled to sit up he could see great wet patches onher nightdress where she had sweated. "What day is it?"
Impatiently, he told her.
"Then it must be tomorrow that the woodworm people will be here. They're coming to see about the woodworm in the room next to your flat. I can't remember what their name is but it doesn't matter." Coughing shook her. "Oh, dear, I can hardly speak. One of my friends will let them in. I expect they'll takeup the floorboards, find out what that ghastly smell is… "
Old clothes lay all over the bedroom. Surely she could have cleared up the ashes in the fireplace. She hadn't always been ill. The air felt unbreathable and enormously, palpably, hot. Flies were everywhere, swarming in the dusty shaft of sunlight.
"Shall I open a window?"
She wasn't too ill to round on him. "Please don't unless you want me to freeze to death. Just leave it." Cough, cough,cough…
Chapter 16
Nerissa recognized the girl from the photograph in the paper, Kayleigh cried when she saw it, and Abbas Reza tried tocomfort her by saying Danila would surely turn up safe and sound. Shoshana never read newspapers. The barmaid in the Kensington Park Hotel might have recognized her as Mix'scompanion, but she didn't see the photograph. She had gone to Spain to work in a seafront bar on the Costa Blanca. Mix had no need to see it. It was enough for him to know that photographor another would be there. The newspaper had got it from one of Danila's brothers, who handed it over while his stepfather was out.
Mix sat downstairs in the drawing room, studying the Yellow Pages, though he should have been at work an hour before.There were so many messages on his mobile that he had erased the lot without looking at them. Ideally, he should phone all these woodworm specialists and check which one of them was coming, but there were dozens, if not hundreds. He'd made atentative attempt at two of them and had had to hold on solong, pressing this key and that, listening to piped music, thathe gave up. The only thing to do was take a day off, stay hereI ad let the man in himself. Or, rather, not let him in, tell himI his services weren't needed. If the Fordyce woman or the other one insisted on staying, they might have a tussle on the doorstep. He must somehow stop that happening.
He'd have to call head office and tell them he was ill. The doctor would come some time in the afternoon, the woodwormman at any time. This evening he was supposed to begoing for a drink with Ed. Suppose he hadn't agreed to take oldChawcer her tea, he wouldn't have found out about the woodwormman-the outcome didn't bear thinking of. It drove him back into the room where Danila lay under the floorboards.T he smell in this extreme heat was worse, awful, like things rotting in the back of a fridge someone had turned off. He felt like breaking a window to let some of it out but he thought of the noise it would make and the fuss it would cause.
As soon as possible he must move the body. Once the woodwormman had been got rid of, the doctor and those women had gone, he would move it and drag it down all fifty-two of,those stairs. For the present, he couldn't stay in his own flat, it was too high up, too remote. He had to be sure he'd hear the doorbell when people came, preferably be stationed where he could see them coming. Halfway down the tiled flight he heard a key turn in the front door lock. Old Ma Fordyce or MaWinthrop. It was Fordyce, the one with the long red fingernails.He heard her slowly stumping up the stairs below himand they met outside old Chawcer's bedroom door.
"Good morning. How are you today?"
"Fine," Mix lied.
"Did you feed the cat?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you," said Olive Fordyce. "I don't see anyone else around, do you? Please give the poor thing some food at once." She went into old Chawcer's bedroom.
Talking to me as if I was her servant, thought Mix. Why shouldn't she feed the bloody cat? He was rather afraid of Otto, who gave him almost human stares of loathing, but he went into the kitchen and looked about him for cans of catfood.His mother had been as messy as Chawcer, the reason hewas such a fastidious housekeeper himself, so he had a good idea where to look. A tin decorated with a picture of a catwashing its paws came to light in the back of a cupboard full of sprouting potatoes and onions growing green shoots. He put half into a saucer and left it on the floor beside a large plasticbag stuffed full of moldy loaf ends and bread rolls.