Alma pushed past the overstuffed armchairs in their lounge and pulled a card from behind her Tyrolean letter-rack. ‘Try calling this number,’ she said. ‘Mrs Mandeville is an old friend of mine from the church. She cured the late Mr Sorrowbridge’s smoking habit, and replaced the springs in his ottoman.’
Bryant read the card:
Kiskaya Mandeville
Herbal Remedies – Organic Therapies –
Hypnotism – Sofas Repaired
‘She sounds like my kind of woman,’ he said, brightening up and reaching for the phone.
14
* * *
DISPOSAL
Just after ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, a chill drenching rain began to fall on Fleet Street. Once, the pavements would still have been crowded with couriers, journalists, printers, picture editors, typesetters, artists and accountants, and the lights of the buildings would have formed unbroken ribbons of luminescence from the Strand to St Paul’s, but now the thoroughfare was almost deserted. The great rolls of paper that had been brought by barge up to the presses of Tudor Street had been moved to the eastern hinterland of the city.
Jocelyn Roquesby tilted the address she had printed out and tried to read it without her glasses. By doing so, she walked straight past her destination, and was forced to back up before the black-framed windows of the little Georgian house that housed the Old Bell Tavern. The pub’s rear door opened out into the courtyard of St Bride’s Church. The cramped corners and angled nooks of its interior had barely changed in centuries. Mrs Roquesby’s fingers itched to punch out a number on her mobile, at least to tell her daughter where she was going, but she had promised not to call anyone.
She scanned the front bar, then moved to the rear of the pub, wondering if she had somehow managed to miss her contact. She had been surprised to receive the text message, and would normally have suggested a morning coffee in the local Starbucks, especially now that she was trying to give up alcohol. However, a tone of anxiety in its phrasing had struck a chord, and she had replied with an agreement to meet in one of their former haunts.
She looked around the pub with a growing sense of disappointment. This place used to be packed, she thought. Now there were just a few lone drinkers at the bar, a couple of elderly tourists studying maps, a pair of snogging teenagers. She was a few minutes early, so she pulled up a bar stool in the corner and ordered herself a vodka and tonic.
Arthur Bryant stood on the corner of Whidbourne Street and studied the supermarket opposite, kicking at the kerb with a scuffed Oxford toecap. The Victoria Cross had stood here for the best part of a hundred years, casting its welcoming saffron light on to the paving stones, its revellers wavering home to their wives at eleven – fewer women, and certainly no single ones of decent repute, would have been out drinking in the early years – or perhaps there had been a lock-in, with the heavy velvet drapes drawn tight to eliminate all light on the street. There the drinkers would have remained – so easy to forget the world outside – until the landlord decided they’d all had enough. ‘Ain’t you got no ’omes to go to?’ he would have called jocularly. ‘You’re going to cop a right earful from your missus when you fall through the front door, Alf.’
Bryant remembered having to pull his father out of virtually every pub in the East End, Bow, Whitechapel, Wapping and Canning Town. It had surprised no one when he died young. Probably a blessing, his mother had said when the old man passed on. Your father was never a happy man. But she had stood by him, despite the pleas from her side of the family to leave and take her son away. Parents rode out the most hellish storms for the sake of their children in those days.
He looked back at the corner, and the mental image of the public house faded to reveal the blank bright windows of the Pricecutter Food & Wine Store, its Indian proprietor staring dully at the sports pages of the Sun. Rain pattered against the glass, plastered with faded advertisements for Nivea moisturizing cream, Ernst and Julio Gallo wine, Thomson Holidays, Zippo’s Circus. The past had realigned itself into the present, and nothing was in its rightful place.
The girl behind the bar had just called last orders. Mrs Roquesby sat back against the wall and listened to the song that was softly playing on the pub’s CD deck. The Everly Brothers, wasn’t it? ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’.
She wanted to sleep, but not dream. Dreams too easily turned into nightmares. Tired, she rested her head against the wall and listened to the lyrics. She had been stood up, but had at least found herself a drinking companion, although now he seemed to have disappeared, and she just wanted to let the night slide away into warm, wood-dark oblivion. A bee-sting, she thought, scratching at the back of her neck, or an insect bite. Odd that they should be around so early in the year . . .