On the third day of July, a week and a half after leaving the estate, he decided to take fate by the horns and visit Toy’s place. Despite Whitehead’s insistence that Bill was dead, Marty kept hope intact. Papa had lied before, many times: why not in this instance?
The house was in an elegant backwater in Pimlico; a road of hushed facades and expensive automobiles straddling the narrow pavements. He rang the doorbell half a dozen times, but there was no sign of life. The venetian blinds were drawn on the downstairs windows; there was a fat wedge of mail-circulars mostly-thrust in the mailbox.
He was standing on the step staring dumbly at the door, knowing full well it wasn’t going to open, when a woman appeared on the next-door step. Not the owner of the house, he was sure: more likely a cleaner. Her tanned face-who wasn’t tanned this blistering summer?-bore the suppressed delight of a bad-news bringer.
“Excuse me. Can I help you?” she inquired hopefully.
He was suddenly glad he’d dressed in jacket and tie to come to the house; this woman looked the kind who’d report her slightest suspicions to the police.
“I was looking for Bill. Mr. Toy.”
She clearly disapproved; if not of him, of Toy.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Do you happen to know where he’s gone?”
“Nobody knows. He just left her. He just upped and left.”
“Left who?”
“His wife. Well . . . lady friend. She was found in there a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you read about it? It was all over the papers. They interviewed me. I told them; I said he wasn’t a pretty piece of work: not at all.”
“I must have missed it.”
“It was all over the papers. They’re looking for him at the moment.”
“Mr. Toy?”
“Murder Squad.”
“Really.”
“You’re not a reporter?”
“No.”
“Only I’m willing, you know, to tell my story, if the price is right. The things I could tell you.”
“Really.”
“She was in a terrible state, apparently . . .”
“What do you mean?”
Mindful of her salability, the matron had no intention of divulging the details, even if she knew them, which Marty doubted. But she was willing to offer a tantalizing trailer. “There was mutilation,” she promised, “unrecognizable, even to her nearest and dearest.”
“Are you sure?”
The woman looked affronted by this smear on her authenticity.
“She either did it to herself, or else somebody did it to her and kept her in there, locked up, bleeding to death. For days and days. The smell when they opened the door-”
The sound of the slushy, lost voice that had answered the telephone came back to Marty, and he knew without doubt that Toy’s lady had already been dead when she spoke. Mutilated and dead, but resurrected as a telephonist to keep up appearances for a useful while. The syllables ran in his ear: “Who is this?” she’d asked, hadn’t she? Despite the heat and light of a brilliant July, he started to shiver. Mamoulian had been here. He’d crossed this very threshold in search of Toy. He had a score to settle with Bill, as Marty now knew; what might a man not plan, while the humiliations festered, in return for such violence?
Marty caught the woman staring at him.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Thank you. Yes.”
“You need some sleep. I have the same problems. Hot nights like these: I get restless.”
He thanked her again and hurried away from the house, without looking back. Too easy to imagine the horrors; they came without warning, out of nowhere.
Nor would they go away. Not now. The memory of Mamoulian was with him-night and day and restless night-from then on. He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality.
There was no time for prevarication. He had to leave; forget Whitehead and Carys and the law. Trick his way out of the country and into America any way he could; away to a place where real was real, and dreams stayed under the eyelids, where they belonged.