move on a regular basis so she supposed the third safe was intended for long-term storage, not everyday use. She wondered if he had already filled it, and if so, with what?
‘Good, eh?’ Tommy said, standing back to admire Sails at Dawn, or rather what it concealed as he had no interest whatsoever in art. ‘You would never know anything was there, would you?’ No, she agreed, she wouldn’t. He was cheerful, almost gleeful. They had only just moved into the house and she was pregnant with Candy at the time. Crystal Holroyd, the newly crowned Queen of High Haven.
He handed her two sets of keys and said, ‘They’re the spares, for if you need to get into one of the safes for your jewellery. And just take whatever cash you need when you want it.’ When she first married him she had found it hard to believe how generous he was. Really landed on my feet, she thought.
No mention was made of the third safe beneath the filing cabinet. It had a spare key too – the safe-installer, full of the joys of coffee and a KitKat, had given it to her when she’d asked for it. He didn’t seem to know that husbands kept secrets from their wives. Or indeed that wives kept secrets from their husbands.
‘Did you watch him fitting the safes in here?’ Tommy asked casually, finally satisfied with the position of Sails at Dawn.
‘Nah, he took hours. I’ve been getting the nursery ready.’ She had loved that word ‘nursery’. It implied so much – love, care, money. ‘I’m going upstairs to finish off, okay, babe?’ They already knew Candy was a girl. ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice,’ Crystal murmured as she arranged the cradle in the nursery. It had cost an arm and a leg, a proper old-fashioned one like you got in fairy tales, draped with lace and silk. She’d made the mistake of watching Rosemary’s Baby recently on TV, late at night on a horror channel, and now she was having a sudden disturbing flashback to the scene where Mia Farrow peers into the crib – a black version of their baby-to-be’s – and realizes she’s given birth to Satan’s baby. Candy would be an angel, not the devil, Crystal reminded herself. And Tommy wasn’t Satan, she thought. (She’d changed her mind about that now.)
She had put the spare key to the third safe beneath the crib mattress. It seemed unlikely that Tommy would be changing the little sheets when they were stained with vomit and shit. Babies weren’t really made of sugar and spice, Crystal knew that, they were flesh and blood and should be cherished accordingly. Since then, the third key (it was like a mystery novel, The Third Key) had travelled around the house to whatever place Crystal deemed the most Tommy-proof, although it had come to rest for some time now inside a bag of frozen edamame beans in the Meneghini, because the day that Tommy looked inside that would be the day hell itself froze.
‘All right?’ Tommy had said, coming into the nursery just as she’d finished smoothing the sheet on the crib’s mattress. He’d fiddled with a mobile of sheep above the crib, sending them spinning round dizzily.
Crystal had been knocked up when she was with the Bassani and Carmody show and they’d given her money for an abortion in Leeds. Fee had gone with her. Not a memory to cherish. She’d been so relieved when it was out of her. ‘Devil’s spawn,’ Fee said, passing her a fag as they waited for the train back. They had enough money left over from what Mick had given them to buy a curry and a half-bottle of vodka. They were fourteen years old. She wondered afterwards why no one in the clinic had asked her age or what had happened to her. Why no one cared. She would care so much about her daughter that no harm would ever come to her.
The sheep had finally stopped spinning and she said, ‘Yeah, everything’s good, Tommy. But we need more pink in here. Lots more pink.’
The filing cabinet was a bugger to move and Crystal had to shuffle and tilt, shuffle and tilt, as if it were a particularly clumsy dance partner, or an upended coffin that she was having to manoeuvre around the floor. She knew what was in it, or at least what was in it the last time she’d looked, because this wasn’t the first