The Girl Below(104)
Once Harold had picked one out (brass handles, mahogany stain) the man with the wire spectacles informed us, perhaps not as delicately as he might have, that his embalmer would be round to start work “right away.” In this heat, he said, they had to move fast or nature did it for them. He wasn’t exaggerating: the embalmer appeared so quickly he must have been waiting outside. His arrival triggered a secret signal to the village that a funeral was imminent, and within the hour, an army of elderly women in shawls descended on the villa and transformed it from muted hospice to hive of burial activity.
While the village women scuttled back and forth with wire brushes and pots of boiling water under a canopy of incense, the family was stranded at the dining table, almost afraid to leave the circle. Only Ari had about him an air of impatience, and nearing twilight, the source of it was revealed. His brother Soteris came to the door of the villa, and after offering his condolences, he and Ari had huddled near the fig tree discussing something in hushed voices. Once Soteris had left, Ari returned to the table with a small piece of paper and stood looking nervously at Pippa. “A few days ago,” he began, “Peggy asked me to carry out her final request.”
“She asked you?” Pippa exclaimed.
“Yes,” said Ari. “And she asked me to keep it a secret”—he looked guiltily at his wife—“from you.”
Pippa’s expression was neutral—neither surprised nor upset—and Ari hurriedly continued. “She wanted everyone in the village to have a shot of Johnny Walker at her wake, and, well, the stuff doesn’t exactly grow on trees around here.”
“So you ordered some ahead of time?” said Pippa.
“Yes.” Ari started to fold up the piece of paper, but Pippa snatched it from his hand and read it.
“Three cases?” she said, incredulous. “And you’re going to pay for that how?”
“I thought . . .” he began, then looked hopefully at Harold. “Any ideas?”
“Sorry, old chum, those brass handles don’t grow on trees either.”
“Wait,” I said, remembering the stash of pound notes. “I think Peggy left something to pay for it.” I fetched the photograph album that had been moonlighting as a bank, and explained that the money had been hidden in Peggy’s fur coat. With all of them watching intently, I was nervous opening the album and my hands jittered on its yellowing, vellum pages. Done in haste, my attempt at stuffing had been poor, and the notes came out creased and in bunches. Harold held out his hands to form a collecting bowl, and Ari took the notes from him and acted as bank teller. The album was wide, and I had to reach far into the corners of the pocket to pull out the stragglers. As well as the money, a clutch of folded scrap paper—the papers I hadn’t looked at before—fell out.
“Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds,” announced Ari, counting the last pile of notes. “But just to make sure, I’m going to count it again.”
Pippa was flabbergasted. “But she always needed to borrow money off us to pay for gas and electricity—and her phone was always getting cut off.”
“Well, now you know why,” said Harold. “She was hoarding it.”
“Maybe she forgot it was there,” said Caleb. “She was pretty mental at the end.”
“I don’t think so,” Pippa said. “She was adamant about bringing her mink over, even though it’s ninety degrees in the shade.”
“No wonder that effing coat weighed a ton,” said Harold, cracking a smile for the first time that day.
“She knew where the money was, all right,” I confirmed. “And when I stayed at her flat, I caught her hiding jewelry in the curtains.”
“Oh God,” said Pippa. “She was still hiding stuff from Jimmy.”
“But Jimmy’s dead—right?” I said.
“We think so,” said Pippa. “But no one really knows what happened to him. One day he just disappeared from his flat, leaving everything in it. The police came to ask us if we’d seen him, but no one had. He was a sitting tenant, like Peggy, so after a while, when he still hadn’t reappeared, they presumed he was dead and the landlord sold the flat.”
“And that’s when they renovated and found out what he’d done?” I asked.
Pippa nodded. “Mummy said she felt like he had been spying on her. It was awful.”
“But he didn’t spy on her—did he?”
“We don’t think so,” said Ari. “But who knows what he got up to. A man like that was capable of anything.” He gathered the pound notes into a wad and smacked it on the table. “Well, this should pay for the wake,” he said, smiling.