Free Shadow Play by Frances Fyfield Page B

did you have to do it? Flapping your hands at her like that, was it a game?’ She spoke as she always did, never raising her voice or changing tone. She could have calmed a herd of wild horses, and out of the corner of her eye she watched him relax and hand her a grubby glass, half-full of his precious nectar.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she continued, in her grumbling, placating tone. ‘All the years I’ve known you and I’ve never been upstairs in your house. Wouldn’t want to either, looking at the rest of it. Never did have cause to go further than the kitchen. All the best parties are in kitchens. Where everything happens. Kitchens. About the only important room in a house. Yours could do with a bit of a clean.’
    She stretched out her legs to prove her point. ‘Ooh, this is nice,’ she said, raising her glass to him with a well-rehearsed wink. ‘Very nice.’ She was choosing not to notice how dirty the glass really was, but whisky would save her from the germs, and she wasn’t frightened of them anyway. You swallowed them as an infant and you were therefore preserved for six generations. Bleach and disinfectant featured in her own home, but she never really expected it to have the same dominion in another’s.
    If she was frightened, and she was, severely frightened, she did not show it. Margaret had kept from her husband the knowledge of his own terminal illness for two years; and she had always played games with children, so she knew how to pretend. She did not tell Logo that she had followed Sylvie into the house, not once but twice, had gone upstairs the first time and into all the rooms until she had found her hiding. Sitting in apparent ease now, it seemed better to say nothing; it was cold, so she drank. Two glasses a day, and she loved him as ever, but now, she was beginning to see what the neighbours meant. The child had been terrified: it wasn’t fair to do that to a child; she felt ashamed of him.
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    G eoffrey Bailey found his room on the third floor. Inside his locker was his own bottle of Scotch, from which he poured a large measure into the tooth mug. Nothing else was his own, of course, it was provided by the Establishment, which left him the freedom of the guest to abuse it. He rubbed his thinning hair as he looked in the mirror. He could colour it purple in here and no-one would notice. The smile faded: he had been surprisingly well fed for a canteen service, as he had been the night before. He might nip out to a pub with Ryan later to watch his black eye fade. The swelling seemed to diminish whenever he smiled, which was often.
    It wasn’t even late, half-nine of a Thursday evening, and he was pleasantly tired, stimulated by learning.
    He could be going home on weekend leave tomorrow, he had that option. On balance, he thought he wouldn’t.
    It wasn’t a Rest Home, but it was a rest. And it was Ryan’s turn to buy a round.

C HAPTER F OUR
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    T he panda car cruised down Legard Street rather faster than usual. It turned right at the end and began a dizzying circumlocution of the streets, left, left, right, right, a progress which seemed to owe nothing at all to the military precision of a prescribed route. It sped down Seven Sisters, looking neither left nor right, in search of the nearest exit which would take it round the back. There was no point pausing here in a car with a stripe down the side: observing the ladies of the night had to be covert or not at all. The punters might not notice a train bearing down on them, but the girls doubled up and disappeared into the black of the road itself, leaving male faces staring out of car windows on the third, desperate time round.
    The policemen in the panda car looked straight ahead. It was an unacknowledged fact that neither was interested in finding anyone whose behaviour would necessitate arrest. Even after an hour and a half, they needed another five minutes with one another to