But Cobb is losing interest now I’m up to speed. ‘Have your lawyer look over the settlement if you want, but we need your reply and a signed copy of our NDA by noon Monday.’
This is monstrous. ‘He’s paying me?’
‘He’s trying to swat whatever bee in your bonnet made you think you could dig through his personal medical data. Frankly, it’s cheaper to pay you off than have to listen to you. Clear?’
Vaux is afraid of having his dick made a tabloid headline. It doesn’t seem to have entered his head that I am pursuing the mystery of my mother’s death.
The thing is, if Vaux really did kill Mum, how did he manage to get her body into the boot of our car?
‘So are we clear?’
‘You shouldn’t have broken in.’
Cobb smiles. I don’t know what it is about that smile unlocks the rage in me but suddenly I’m lurching forward, fists clenched, furious. ‘You want I show you the trouble you’re in?’
‘Try it.’ He sees me hesitate, smiles – and disappears. Vanishes. One moment he is sitting in my living room. The next moment – nothing.
The cameras I have mounted round my flat – my household insurance policy requires them – will reveal nothing, because there is nothing for them to reveal. Cobb, whoever Cobb was, was never here. I have been talking to the air.
The room has flipped back to normal. It is as clean and tidy as I left it. There are no papers anywhere.
Nothing has been touched.
SEVENTEEN
Midway through Easter break, Michel turned up at the hotel to help me carry my bags over to Sand Lane.
I had been living alone since school broke up. Dad was already off working for his private clinic. How typical of Dad that, having invented a way for blind servicemen to see, and all but set up a clinic in his home, he should now be doing the same work, at the other end of the country, at some other person’s beck and call, for a pittance.
The sale of the hotel was due to go through any day. How this could even be legal baffled me. It meant that the business, the property, the chattels, everything must have been made out in my father’s sole name. Yet it had been Sara’s family money that had paid for the place. Perhaps Dad realised from the very beginning that Mum was not to be trusted with the family’s finances. And, looking at this the other way, perhaps Sara had been right all along about Dad’s oppression of her, and his will to control.
How and when Dad made his arrangements with Poppy, I never knew. The only time I remember him and Poppy ever meeting was when we ran into her in the supermarket, a few days after Sara’s disappearance became public knowledge.
She came up to us at the checkout and, in heavy tones, she had said that if ever there was anything she could do for us, we had only to ask. She’d never shown the slightest interest in us before. ‘Now call me,’ she said.
Now we had this gimcrack arrangement whereby I would stay with Poppy and Michel until the end of the school year. Picture Michel and me, studying for our exams, elbow to elbow in those cupboard-sized rooms, deep in the heart of that housing estate I could not stand. What Poppy made of this arrangement – why she ever suggested it – is a mystery I have never been able to fathom.
Poppy’s front garden was even more doll-like than its neighbours. Nothing had been permitted to grow above waist height. It was the garden of someone grown suspicious of life’s potential. The back garden was more or less a mirror image of the front: dwarf conifers and heathers, and an anaemic-yellow lawn so close-mown, so fine-bladed, you could see the earth beneath.
The back door was open. The kitchen smelled of detergent. Poppy sat reading a library book – a collection of humorous newspaper columns. She saved her place with a tasselled plastic bookmark and stood to greet me. ‘I’ll show you the house.’ She couldn’t have freighted the process with more dignity if she’d been leading me around a stately home.
‘This is the master bedroom.’
What was I supposed to say?
‘This is the living room.’
When Poppy spoke, it was always at the shrill end of her register, as though she was pleading in her own defence.
‘This is the kitchen. And this is where you came in.’ Did she imagine the tour had disorientated me?
We ate in the kitchen, squatting on chrome stools upholstered in black vinyl. The stools were old. Their leather-look texture had worn off and they were as slippy to sit on as if they had been oiled. The table was worse – a chipboard thing, laminated in frictionless wood-effect plastic. It was the kind of table you get in caravans. It was attached to the wall. You let it down by pulling a handle.
Poppy laid out matching cutlery. Glasses. Cups. Cake knives. There was barely any room for food. ‘I’ve made you a cream tea.’ There was a freezer-cabinet cream cake. Dry, feathery home-made scones with cream. A fruit salad with cream in a jug. Everything in tiny portions.
Poppy had laid out plastic laminated place-mats for us, and our plates moved about on them while we were eating. Watching me, Poppy’s anxiety reached fever pitch – she was afraid I might place too much weight on the table’s mechanism. ‘Please don’t lean on the table. Don’t put anything heavy on the table. It’s a let-down!’
I was more concerned with trying to keep my arse on the stool. I kept slipping off, trying to reach things as they spun away from me across the table’s ice-smooth surface. Afterwards I buzzed from all the sugar I had eaten, and the back of my mouth felt fluey, clotted with uncooked flour.
‘We should have eaten outside! In the garden! It’s such a nice evening. We could have eaten outside!’
She insisted on washing up. ‘I know where everything goes.’ Michel and I went into his bedroom and he dug out a cassette tape for us to listen to. We sat on his bed. It was incredibly narrow. ‘It’s a two-foot six.’ Poppy came in to put clothes away.
She gave Michel no privacy at all. How could there have been much privacy, in a space as cramped as this? Michel’s room was as long and narrow as the living space on board a yacht. There was a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, and its grey, pitiless light brought the walls in even further. It felt, sitting in that room, like being squashed into a Tupperware box.
I remember there was this weird, wood-effect plastic panel that went around the wall. ‘It’s to stop the bed from marking the wall,’ Michel explained.
‘What’s the problem with the bed marking the wall?’
‘Mum doesn’t want it to.’
‘The bed’s in the way. She’s never going to know whether it’s marking the wall or not.’
Michel’s bed ran lengthways along the left-hand wall. His desk, narrow as a shelf and veneered in wood-effect plastic, ran lengthways along the right-hand wall. There was a cupboard to the right of the door, which, instead of opening normally, slid along metal runners ‘to save space’. Michel’s bedroom door, the let-down table in the kitchen, the shelf-like desk and the sofa in the living room, its seat so narrow it might have been built for children, were all parts of Poppy’s on-going programme to single-handedly ‘save space’. (Poppy’s talk was modular, a collection of preprocessed jargon phrases strung together. After a few days of this, everything she said began to acquire a meaning beyond itself, like a word repeated so often it turns strange in the mouth.)
Poppy burst into Michel’s room whenever she felt like it. Or she tried to. If you leant against Michel’s wardrobe, it slipped on the thin nylon carpet (sick-green cobwebs on a ground of darker green) and blocked the door. The bang the door made when it hit the edge of the wardrobe was startlingly loud.
‘Oh! Mind the paintwork! Come and move the wardrobe!’