in the ambulance. No need for the siren.
The nosey old bitch on the ground floor had been woken up by the crash but she’d missed the ambulance coming and going because of the time it took to get her curlers out and change into her best housecoat (quilted nylon, much too long on her). She said they ought to have hot, sweet tea, like in the Blitz. It wasn’t proper tea, though. It was that perfumed gnat’s piss they all pretended to like. Very friendly all of a sudden but she served it in the kitchen china just the same and she didn’t offer any to the policemen.
One of them came over. Did either of them know the deceased and where did his family reside? Reside. Pillock. Then he went back over to the porter’s desk to arrange for some poor sod from the Putney branch to wake Old Mother Hullavington with the glad tidings.
‘What the bloody hell happened to Henry?’ whispered Jane.
Henry had been watching the whole thing from the sitting-room window upstairs while he was trying to get through to the wife. Once he’d seen the girls safely out of the car he sloped off down the fire escape to the garage where he kept the Bentley. The A30 was clean as a whistle and he was back in Virginia Water by midnight. Penelope was alone in the house when he got back, having waited up with a bottle of Cointreau. Penelope wanted to know what time he called this so he called it half past ten – just in case he needed an alibi.
The phone on the desk rang while the policemen were outside inspecting the front of the Volvo. Jim the porter answered it, nodded and yes-sirred a few times then signalled to Suzy who had started to cry. Whoever it was didn’t have a lot to say and she was back on the settee before the policemen had even noticed her get up.
‘Was that him?’ whispered Jane.
‘He wasn’t here, all right? He’ll sort everything out.’ Suzy spoke very quietly, without moving her lips.
It was all shaping up like a tragic accident – Careless Driving at a pinch – until the police started taking statements from people and Jim the porter told them he’d seen the car deliberately accelerate into the wall. Thanks, Jim. And then the other nosey old bitch – the one who had the flat on the other side of the main door where the crash was – went and stuck her oar in. Mrs Kowalski, her name was. Foreign.
Mrs Kowalski had seen the whole bloody thing and she’d tottered out into the front hall and started shooting her mouth off. She had a ginger wig stuck on all anyhow and a white space at the front of her head where her face ought to have been: no eyebrows; no eyelashes; no cheeks; no lips. Without Max Factor there was nobody there. They took her statement over by the porter’s desk but she was stone deaf so you could hear every word. Young women in motor cars at all hours driving. Decent people asleep. And not the first time flat fifty-two a nuisance made. The policeman’s ears pricked up. What flat number did she say? He finished taking her statement and was just nipping out to have a word with the radio bloke in the police car when he heard the clang of a tin pail on the tarmac outside. While he’d been busy with Mrs K, Jim the porter had wandered off to his little glory hole under the main stairs to get a mop and a bucket and a bottle of Jeyes Fluid and had calmly trotted outside to wash all that mess off the stonework. What was his game? More to the point, what were the CID going to say?
The CID pulled up a few minutes later in a shiny black Humber. The detective sergeant had a few words with the constable then strolled over to the settee. Carefully combed hair, dandruff (if allowed to run riot, dandruff can even lead to baldness), shiny blue suit. Married. He even smelled married: a nasty mixture of pipe tobacco and cough sweets and meat pie. Jane tried to picture the wife: a carrot-topped, pear-shaped, apple-cheeked housewife in a floral apron and K Skips baking bloody biscuits in Barnet.
Something about the magic number fifty-two had got them talking about accompanying them down to the station. No charge or anything. No taking down and