"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)
Sally's sunny nature shone most brightly in adversity, like polished brass on a dark day. That this could be extremely irritating to The Mount's depressive patients she had yet to learn. The others, provided they weren't too manic, or schizoid, or stressed, loved her for her cheerfulness. Simon loved Rhoda and wasn't influenced one way or the other. She was sorry that the car couldn't be used for a day or two, she told him with a wide smile, but it was probably a lot healthier to go walking. How about a stroll down to the woods to see the bluebells? Bluebells didn't interest him particularly, but when she found a patch of grass fairly free of them and suggested that they should sit down, he sat. She was wearing a blue tracksuit, a little tight over the hips, but wasn't making any effort to be sexy. That Sally had the knack of oozing sexiness when the occasion seemed right, and appearing coolly virginal when it didn't, he was yet to learn. Street-wise Sally sensed that working on Simon would take time, and there wasn't just the barrier of bereavement to be breached. There was someone else, she guessed, someone absent. Maybe the woman Creggan had told her about, the one who dried her undies on Simon's clothes line and had black hair down to her waist. "Like a Spanish senorita," he had told her, "or senora, not a pretty little bambino like my Sally Loreto." How Creggan could get maudlin on mild beer she didn't know, but he obviously could. She had teased him about being a peeping Tom and he had told her sadly that he wasn't. "If only the occasion would present itself, my lovely child, but it never does. The villagers draw their curtains at night and only the stars smile at me." And then, in a sudden change of mood, he had told her quite sharply never to go out with Simon in his car. "He drives like a lunatic at Brand's Hatch. One of these days he'll be scraped off the road with a shovel."
Sally wondered if Creggan had slashed the tyres. Some of the nurses at The Mount thought he was as sane as they were, which wasn't saying much. The only sane people up at The Mount were herself and the rest of the domestic staff, with the possible exception of the cook, Mrs Mackay. With her it was hard to tell. She didn't socialise. A bit manic, perhaps, the way she washed poultry under the tap as if a whoosh of water would drown listeria, or whatever nasty bug the food people would think of next, and then she would spend ages drying the thing, patting away at it with a paper towel. That the food she produced was so good was surprising, considering how soggy it was at the start. The food was one of the few good things at The Mount - better than the tips. The patients gave her the odd tenner or two when they left, but seldom more. Mrs Bradshaw had given her a brooch shaped like the letter L. "L for Lisa," she said, "my name. And L for Loreto, your surname. Have it. I don't want it." It was made of small enamel flowers and didn't look valuable, though it was pretty if you liked that sort of thing. Sally didn't. Brooches were for elderly ladies, even the word sounded ancient - like corsets. The only jewellery Sally liked was earrings, preferably something rather African like large metal hoops, but you couldn't safely wear them at The Mount. Patients on medication did odd things, and even odder things before they were medicated. Doctor Donaldson had warned her but she hadn't taken any notice until a middle-aged bank clerk who looked as harmless as a neutered cat had snatched one of them off and eaten it. Luckily it was small enough and loose enough not to tear her ear lobe - or to stick in his throat and kill him. She hadn't told Donaldson, presumably the patient hadn't either, and she hadn't worn earrings on duty again.
She lay back on the grass with her hands behind her head and looked at Simon. He had a pretty awful hair style, short all over but beginning to grow a bit now and straggle on the nape of his neck. If he let the top bit grow and gave it a dollop of mousse it would balance his face better. He had the kind of lips, not too thin, that she wouldn't mind exploring with her tongue, but not yet. She would know when he was ready, probably before he did, but there was no point in rushing it.
A bluebell with a twisted stalk was caressing her forehead. She moved her face from side to side and laughed when it tickled.
Joyous Sally.
Oh, God, Simon thought. He didn't know if he liked her or not. When she talked she babbled a lot of nonsense, and when she didn't she lay on her back giggling with her breasts bobbing up and down.
She stopped giggling and her breasts stopped bobbing. He looked away. Too quickly.
She smiled secretly behind his back. "Si ... mon." Long drawn out like two musical notes.
He kept his eyes fixed ahead of him. They were only just inside the woods and the long grass was a swirl of green all the way down to the perimeter wall. A rabbit, maybe a stoat... no, a bird, fluttered through a clump of bracken.
"Si ... mon." A little crisper.
"What?" He was cross and didn't know why he was cross.
"Present for you, Simon. Look ..."
He looked round cautiously. She was sitting up now and her hand was extended to him, palm uppermost, holding the brooch which gleamed brightly against her pale skin.
It was a bauble. Cheap. And instantly recognisable, He had been about twelve when he had bought it for his mother's Christmas present. He remembered the - day out with his father very clearly. They had gone shopping together in Bristol and his father had told him to choose whatever he liked for his mother and to tell him if he needed more cash. The fifteen quid he'd saved had been ample. Three quid for his mother's brooch, a tenner for a cigarette lighter shaped like a Porsche for his father, together with a couple of quids' worth of cigarettes. His father had been pleased with the lighter, which he had given to him straight away as a pre-Christmas present, but had been doubtful about the brooch. "Make it a pre-Christmas present, too, Simon. I've got your Mum a gold bracelet and she might prefer something else - not jewellery - from you." He hadn't said that it was too cheap. And Simon couldn't remember saying that he'd bought it because it was pretty. But his father had looked rather keenly at him and must have guessed. "Okay," he'd said, "let's chance it. Wrap it. Keep it for Christmas." His mother had, in fact, appeared to like the brooch very much, and his father had smiled at her and pinned it on her dress. His gift, the bracelet, had been received with far less enthusiasm. She had made a joke about gilt and gold, and his father had quipped back quite sharply about having a nineteen-carat conscience. None of this had Simon understood at the time. And he didn't want to dwell on it now. Gilt. Guilt. A long time ago. What did it matter?
"It's for you," Sally said. "Your mum's."
It was odd she had been wearing it up at The Mount. He hadn't seen her wearing it around the house. All her other jewellery was good stuff. Perhaps if you wore good jewellery at The Mount it got nicked. This wasn't worth nicking. Or maybe she had genuinely liked it and wore it for that reason. But why give it away?
He asked Sally why his mother had given it to her. Sally explained about the L. "It was just a little pressie. Simon. L for Loreto. She usually gave a cash tip, but she hadn't any cash on her. She didn't have to give me anything, and this was a bit personal, I mean L for her name, too. But she didn't seem too bothered with it - I mean, not sentimentally attached or anything. So I accepted it, but you can have it if you want it, to keep - in memory, sort of - you know what I mean. But if you'd rather I hung on to it, then I will. It's for you to say."
But Simon had nothing to say. He got up and walked down through the tall grass towards the road. His throat was raw as if he were starting a cold and his eyes were burning. He had the same reaction sometimes when he opened the wardrobes in his mother's bedroom and saw all the clothes hanging neatly like brightly coloured shrouds. They had to be got rid of. The lot of them.
His father's too. They should all go. Someone from the church might do it. He couldn't do it himself, any more than he could touch that brooch. He wasn't aware that he was clutching the rough stone wall hard enough to flake off pieces of moss and graze the skin of his thumb.
"Simon?" Not the fluting, seductive tone now. Genuine sympathy. He couldn't answer. Not yet. She was wise enough not to mention the brooch again, or to tell him, when she went to stand beside him, that his thumb was bleeding. Instead she suggested that it might be better if they started strolling back. "It's getting chilly."
But it will be warmer in time, Simon. And we have all the time in the world.
When you work in a psychiatric hospital you learn some of the jargon. You can't help picking it up. Some of the therapy at The Mount seemed reasonable to Sally. When people were under stress they needed to get away from whatever was bugging them. Her family had bugged her, especially her Da, though, fair play, the old man hadn't done anything he shouldn't. No sin of the flesh. When her Ma had walked out on them he had expected her to get a local job, waitressing or something, and live at home and look after him. If she had she would have landed up in a N.H.S. equivalent to The Mount. As a patient.
To get on in the world you had to look after yourself. A sense of self was one of the phrases she'd picked up at The Mount. She had that, all right. She knew who she was. Were there people who didn't, apart from amnesiacs? And she liked who she was. A nice body, kept fit by daily jogging, and a brain that didn't brood or go haywire or cause her or anyone else any aggro. As for sexually induced neurosis - had she got that phrase right? - she hadn't any. And no sexually induced disease. Luck on her side there, of course, though she tended to touch wood when she thought of AIDS. Superstition might be a weakness, but you only became an obsessive if you touched wood or washed your hands all day. She didn't know what category Mrs Bradshaw had been slotted into. Her stay at The Mount had been short and she hadn't spent all the time in bed, though she might have spent some of it in Donaldson's bed. But surely he could have visited her in her home when the professor wasn't there? Cheaper for her. But perhaps she didn't pay any fees at The Mount, got it for free. Donaldson had been looking pretty sick himself since the funeral. And who did he think he was kidding with his vodka and tonic? Was he trying to kill his libido, if that was the word, with ninety percent proof? No more Mrs Bradshaw. No more sex. Oh dear, poor old Doc.
Simon's parents had gone over the edge about thirty years too soon. Fate tended to do that sort of thing sometimes. But only to other people.
If Simon had tried to evaluate his first date with Sally he would have given himself nil for effort and a few pluses to her for trying. Compared with Rhoda she hadn't amounted to very much, a stand-in player on an otherwise empty stage when the star had gone. Even so, she was a warm presence, bonny and bouncy, and thawed the ice of his solitude a little.
She arranged all future dates to slot in with her time off from The Mount, which varied according to her duties. Most of the work was in the kitchen and dictated by the needs of Mrs Mackay: preparing vegetables, loading the dishwasher, and carrying breakfast and tea trays to the patients. It was usually possible to have a couple of hours off in the afternoon, and the evenings, on a duty rota system, were free on alternate days. Mrs Mackay, usually not communicative, had praised her once or twice for doing her job quite well, and then warned her not to get too pally with the patients. "They're not like us, m'dear." A generalisation, Creggan not mentioned, but message received and understood. And ignored.
Sally believed that Mrs Mackay's disapproval of Creggan was due to his Spartan diet. His rejection of her gourmet meals must have cut her to the quick. Even the craziest of The Mount's crazies drooled over her culinary art. Creggan's drooling over Sally couldn't be known by Mrs Mackay unless she slunk around his tepee and peeked in now and then, which Sally couldn't imagine, or else Creggan might have said something indiscreet to one of the other domestics and it had been passed on. Sally couldn't believe that, either. Creggan wasn't indiscreet. You said things to Creggan and he talked nonsense back to you. Amusing nonsense. Sexy nonsense. For an old guy he had the hots on pretty often, or seemed to. You couldn't be sure with him. How much was a joke and harmless? How much serious intent? Banter followed by bed, or just banter for the sake of it?
But there wasn't any banter when she spoke to him about Simon. He listened and clammed up. Jealous? Perhaps. It was fun to needle him, but funnier had he snapped back. His earlier warning about Simon's driving wasn't repeated. When she told him that Simon had asked her to sort out his parents' clothes and give them to charity he had looked at her sombrely and, apart from saying it was a miserable task, hadn't commented further.
It wasn't in the least a miserable task, though Simon probably thought it would be. He had to go into Bristol to see his solicitor, he told her, so wouldn't be able to take her out as arranged. And then, looking very embarrassed, he had asked would she mind awfully, not think it too presumptuous (yes, he had said presumptuous, much as Kester-Evans would have done) to get his parents' clothes together while he was out and arrange for any charity she knew about to come and collect? He hadn't said that he couldn't bear to be there while she was doing it, and she hadn't told him that she would be delighted. Her "Of course I don't mind. Anything I can do to help ..." had sounded suitably sad.
After he had gone she had prowled around the house, as Rhoda had several weeks ago, and imagined herself living there. A very swish, very rich place, Simon's home, though it could do with a few improvements. The fawn-coloured carpets reminded her of wet beaches at twilight. The rooms would look much better with floors of tangy orange and grey or swirls of gold and green, strong gorgeous patterns, big and bold and eyecatching. And the plain velvet curtains had probably cost the earth but the colours were drab and boring, and so were the settees and chairs. She would cover them with a pattern of parakeets on branches or pale pink peonies on a turquoise background. All the rooms, if they were hers, would sing.
Sally, humming with pleasure at the thought of it all, went upstairs, stripped and ran a bath for herself in the larger of the two bathrooms, the one with the corner bath, which was white. As she lay soaking in the steamy water scented with Lisa's bath crystals, she dreamed of improvements here, too. The chrome taps would be changed for gold ones, and the plain white Venetian blinds would be taken down and replaced by black Austrian ones edged with white lace like sexy knickers.
Did Lisa have sexy underwear? she wondered. She had only seen her in her dressing gown, navy blue velvet with white buttons and one button missing at the top which she had pinned with the brooch. The brooch she hadn't wanted.
A woman's undies say a lot about her, Sally believed, even more than the clothes on top. She got out of the bath and dried herself on a chocolate brown towel that matched the chocolate brown carpet tiles - hadn't Lisa had any sense of colour? Then, refreshed, she began turning out the clothes of the dead.
If you have too much of a conscience, Sally told herself, you don't thrive, but if it makes you feel any better about thriving at the expense of others then it's easy to think up an excuse or two. If the Bradshaws' clothes were given to a local charity Simon might meet his mother's grey and cream silk dress emerging from the bingo hall on the back of a slag tall and thin enough to put it on. And his father's tweed suit might be seen adding a bit of class to a wino slurping beer in the local pub. And that was true of all the clothes, which were a mixture of shabby casual (once expensive) and restrained smart. Lisa's three evening gowns all had designer labels and she had obviously gone for quality rather than quantity. They didn't look all that much in the hand but the quality of the material was super, one in rich ruby velvet and two in different tones of brocade. Sally, totting it up, scribbled a thousand plus in her notebook.
You get better prices if you don't squash clothes into black bin liners but once you've filled four suitcases and the bed is still piled high with sports clothes, shirts, slips, nighties, briefs, bras, tights, socks, shoes, tuxedos, anoraks, pyjamas, macks, pullovers, etc. etc., then you haven't any option but to use them. By mid-afternoon a dozen bin liners were lined up in the hall, together with a large battered brown leather suitcase which had belonged to Peter and three nearly as large, but lighter in weight and colour, which had been used mainly by Lisa. Sally wondered about the ones that had been incinerated on holiday. They had probably held a couple of thousand quids' worth, too, plus any jewellery they'd had with them.
Sally stopped smiling and sighed.
Being dead was a terrible waste of effort. You gathered up all this stuff and then - wham - you weren't around any more to enjoy it.
But others were. And they'd be fools if they didn't. She'd tell Simon she'd given the lot to Oxfam. Sally, rather tired by now, went back upstairs and had another look through the drawers in case she had missed anything. She hadn't touched any of the jewellery, it might have been listed. And Simon hadn't said anything about toilet things and brushes and combs, or his mother's switch of hair which had been wrapped in tissue in her handkerchief drawer.
Sally had another look at the hair and stroked it gently. It was a bit macabre if you thought of the Rapunzel murders. Lisa had probably bought it a long time ago, before the murders had started. Or it might have been a switch of her own hair. The people in the Nearly New shop wouldn't want it and Simon wouldn't like to see it lying around, any more than he'd like to see the black and gold evening bag that was the only thing of Lisa's that Sally could use, if Simon wasn't looking.
On the whole, she thought, it had been a rewarding sort of day. The self-drive van she had ordered to carry her and the loot to Gloucester was due in about twenty minutes. There was just time to hang Simon's present in the empty wardrobe. It had cost her a week's wages, but was probably worth it.
As for the hair, hang on to it? Chuck it?
Chuck it later, perhaps, when she got back to The Mount.
She stuffed it in the pocket of her anorak and went downstairs for a quick g. and t.
Alan Drew, junior partner of the Bristol firm of solicitors Alfringham and Drew, had handled Professor Bradshaw's affairs over the last few years and had known the family well enough to be a bearer of Lisa's coffin at the funeral. One of those onerous tasks you can't politely refuse. He would have politely refused the onerous task his senior partner had landed, on him now only
for the fact that Alfringham would probably make a worse cock-up of it. A delay in probate wasn't unusual, but the reason for it in this case was rather embarrassing. Everything would be sorted out soon, he hoped. Young Simon was due to inherit a hefty lump sum in due course and there was enough cash in his account in the meantime to see him through. He'd already bought a car with some of it. A talk about cars was as good a lead into the tricky subject of money as anything else. Simon had apologised for being late, he'd had a problem parking the Lotus Eclat he'd said. "New?" Drew had asked. "Almost," Simon had answered. "How new?" Drew had persisted, trying to see the financial background. "Five years," Simon had answered honestly. Drew had relaxed.
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