The Water Room(56)
Kallie had never been prone to tears, but she found it hard to stop them now.
‘I have to do it, Kal. They’re not going to pay me a penny more. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any savings. I can’t get work here. What else can I do?’ Paul was pacing before her in his unravelling turquoise sweater, more angry and confused than she’d ever seen him.
‘There must be something. What about Neil, doesn’t he have any connections?’
‘He sells vases and candle-holders to retailers, for God’s sake. Even if he could find me something, how long do you think I’d last? I’ve always been in the music business. I survived the price-fixing scandals, the Britpop explosion, I made it through hip-hop and the boy bands, but the only growth area is acoustic stuff and I know nothing about that.’
‘Couldn’t you learn?’
‘I detest acoustic sets. I don’t want to earn a living doing something I hate. I know it’s selfish, but if I don’t take the chance now, I’ll always be thinking about what might have been. You’re covered, you’ve got this house and your modelling work, your friends, all your other interests. Besides, it may turn out to be good for both of us. It’s not going to be for ever.’
He wanted to take off. Paul had already decided to fulfil his dream and travel around the world. He explained he would be back in six months, nine at the most. Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Prague, Greece, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan—he had already described the itinerary in detail. She wondered how long the idea had been forming in his head. She wanted to argue that he was running away from his problems, that if he couldn’t make it here and now, building a new home with her, then she was not about to wait around for him. But the words dried in her mouth.
‘I could go with you.’ She hadn’t meant to suggest it, because she knew what he would say.
‘I’ll be doing bar and DJ work to pay my way. What would you do? You’re happy in your own home, it’s what you always wanted.’
She had promised herself that she would discuss the matter rationally, but now a crackling cloud of panic settled on her. ‘I don’t know. There’s something wrong here and I don’t understand—while you were away I became so nervous, it’s not like me, I kept hearing water, and it felt as though someone had been in the house behind my back, my stuff was moved around—’
‘You’re just over-sensitive to the fact that the old lady died here, Kal. And there are pipes running under the bathroom floor. How do you think the water drains away?’
‘There was that awful thing, the crayfish, in the garden. It’s like we’re living at the coast instead of being in the centre of town.’
‘But you love it, and I know you’ll settle. You took a year off and got the travel bug out of your system. Can’t you see how unhappy I am? If I wait any longer, I’ll grow old and die under these fucking grey skies without ever having experienced the world.’ He untangled her reluctant hands from his. ‘I have to, Kal, this place is killing what we have. I don’t feel at home here. I have to go.’
She found it hard to believe this was the same man who had said he would never leave. Something deep within him had changed. Paul’s determination to be free of her finally made her cry. She sobbed because now there was no going back to what they had shared, because he had not answered his mobile, and because she had seen the faint crescent of the lovebite on his neck.
18
* * *
THE HOUSE IN BRICK LANE
Arthur Bryant wedged his crowbar under the lid of the mildewed pine storage crate and prised it off, scattering rusty nails all over the floor of the office at Mornington Crescent. The box had been kept under a railway arch in a lock-up at King’s Cross, but construction companies were tearing down the arches, and he had been forced to find a new home for his collection. It had been May’s idea to bring his partner’s memorabilia into the unit, because he felt sorry that Bryant had lost so much in the blaze, even though it had been his own fault.
Bryant knew that he was being provided with a displacement activity, something to quell his overactive imagination until Raymond Land sanctioned a new case. Inside the musty container were relics of his greatest successes. He carefully eased out Rothschild, his mange-riddled Abyssinian cat, and set it on the shelf above his desk. He had replaced its missing eyes with a pair of coloured marbles, but there was no substitute for the back leg that had fallen off some years ago. The stuffed feline had once been the familiar of Edna Wagstaff, the renowned Deptford medium, who had now sadly passed to the Other Side herself, to join Squadron Leader Smethwick and Evening Echo, her informants from beyond. Most of Bryant’s books had been destroyed in the fire, but reaching into the box he was pleased to discover battered copies of Malleus Maleficarum, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (first edition), Mayhew’s London Characters and Crooks, J. R. Hanslet’s All of Them Witches, Deitleff’s Psychic Experience in the Weimar Republic, Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes and Brackleson’s Stoat-Breeding for Intermediates. Further down were items that stirred long-dormant memories: a programme from the Palace Theatre for Orphée aux Enfers, the scene of their first case; the claw of a Bengal tiger found pacing about a west London bedroom; a monarch butterfly that had acted as a vital clue in stemming a Soho drug epidemic; a runic alphabet used to solve a bizarre suicide in the city. He had begun to write up each case as a chapter in the unit’s memoirs, and knowing that they could not be published in his lifetime, made them as scurrilous and slander-packed as possible, a cathartic exercise that temporarily expunged the bitterness he felt at being held back by idiots.