The Girl Below(71)

“Anyway,” said Harold, finally catching his breath. “Enough about me. Now it’s your turn.”

I was still cringing from the epiphany, vowing never to speak of myself again. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Tell me why you came back to London. I mean, isn’t everyone else trying to emigrate to New Zealand—the clean, green paradise of the Pacific?”

“New Zealand isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” I stood up, pulling my jacket over my head. “I don’t care if we get wet,” I said, and dashed across the boggy grass in search of the nearest crowd.

That evening, the three of us sat down to dinner. Harold had nearly burned down the kitchen cooking steak, but the result was surprisingly tasty. I told him so but got no reply. He was still sulking about my running away from him in the park. Sitting next to him, Caleb said very little either; he was still zonked from alcohol poisoning and ate like a trucker, then disappeared upstairs. After a second bottle of wine, Harold started to thaw, and by the time we loaded the dishwasher, he was whistling a medley of show tunes—Evita mainly, with a smattering of Cats, nothing post-1985.

It was then I remembered that I hadn’t found out about the incident with Peggy and the floorboards. “What happened?” I said, filling up the sink with hot, soapy water and preparing to attack the burned pan. “Was Peggy trying to find something?”

For a moment, Harold said nothing, and I thought he was still sulking.

“Maybe,” he said, finally. “The business with Jimmy really got to her.”

Even now, I was too nervous to say his name. “Was he as bad as everyone said?”

“Worse,” said Harold. “Much worse.” He told me that Jimmy had been waiting in line to be hanged on the day that capital punishment was abolished. Year later when he was released he came to live in Ladbroke Gardens with the woman who had been his barrister and who, for such treachery, was disbarred. On the whole, Harold said, Jimmy kept to himself, but he could be extremely intimidating when provoked. Harold’s abandoned bicycle had caused one such episode, after Jimmy got so sick of it being in the hallway that he began urinating on it. Harold never used the bike and didn’t even notice, but after a time, the urine began to leak through the floorboards and seep into the ceiling of our basement flat. When my mother worked out what had been causing the smell, she was livid and charged upstairs. Jimmy, apparently, had been meek. But about a month later, when my father was knocking down walls and clearing out rubble to convert our flat into a maisonette, Jimmy came downstairs with an ax to complain. At this point in his tale, Harold noticed a bottle of wine in the pot cupboard and took it out.

“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” I said, recognizing the bottle as the one I’d brought on my first visit to Pippa’s. “It was the cheapest in the off-license.”

He ignored my warning and unpeeled the stopper, then poured himself a healthy glass.

“Actually, can I have one too?”

“Sure,” said Harold.

“So wait a minute,” I said, trying to piece together Harold’s story. “Jimmy hacked the floorboards? I thought you said Peggy did it herself.”

“She did,” he said, grimacing as he swallowed a mouthful of the wine, followed by another. “Years later, after Jimmy died, the person who bought his flat decided to renovate. When their builders ripped out the walls and ceilings, they found hundreds of stolen wallets and credit cards—stashed there by Jimmy over a period of twenty years.”

“And that’s what Peggy was looking for?”

“Possibly, but she got done over by him in a different way. Just before my birthday one year, she got a phone bill so huge it would have bankrupted her to pay it. She complained to BT, but they didn’t believe she hadn’t made all those calls—especially when they found out she had teenage children.” Harold downed the rest of his glass and poured another. “Peggy read us the riot act, and the phone got cut off for six months while she paid off the bill in installments. But guess what the builders found?”

“That Jimmy had been using her phone?”

“He’d run wires up through the ceiling. The whole thing made Peggy really paranoid—and I guess she only got more so with age.”

It hadn’t been open for long, but the third bottle of wine was already half empty. “Hopefully I’ll sleep better tonight,” I said, finishing off my glass.

“Insomnia?” said Harold. “I get that too. Sometimes it’s so bad I can’t drive the next day.”