Chapter 2
It was six in the evening when Carmen Todd let herself back into her empty house. She’d been helping out at the shelter for the homeless in Paddington since ten o’clock, serving up plates of Christmas dinner and pouring endless mugs of steaming hot, conker-brown tea. Nobody at the shelter knew who she was, which suited Carmen just fine. Now, reaching her bedroom, she stripped off her bleached blue sweatshirt and old jeans and chucked them into the laundry basket. They’d been clean on this morning, but you never wanted to stay in the clothes you’d visited the shelter in.
In the bathroom, Carmen switched on the power shower and examined her face in the bathroom mirror while she waited for the water to heat up. Her short black hair was tousled and spiky, as if she’d spent ages faffing it about with gel and mousse - except she hadn’t. Her dark brown eyes stood out against the pallor of her face and her slanted eyebrows were more like the ticks made by a teacher with a fat felt pen, in a hurry to finish marking. She knew she could look better than this, but no one at the shelter was all that bothered when it came to make-up. So long as she slipped them a few extra cigarettes, that was all they cared about.
Oh well, maybe next Christmas would be better for both them and herself.
The doorbell rang just as she was about to climb into the shower. Hesitating, Carmen wondered who on earth it could be at six o’clock on Christmas night. Not carol singers, surely. She certainly wasn’t expecting any visitors.
But not answering the door - or at least speaking into the entryphone - was beyond her capabilities. Hurriedly wrapping a daffodil-yellow towel round herself - not that anyone could see her, but old habits died hard - Carmen padded through to the hallway and pressed the button on the speaker.
‘Yes?’
‘Carmen Todd, this is the police. Open the door please, we have a warrant to search the premises.’
Breathless with disbelief, Carmen said cautiously, ‘Rennie? Is that you?’
‘Of course it’s me! Open the door this minute, woman, before my feet freeze to the pavement. And you’d better put some clothes on before I get there.’
Startled, Carmen leapt back from the entryphone. ‘How d’you know I’m not dressed?’
‘I’m a man. It’s my job to know these things. Superman isn’t the only one with X-ray vision, let me tell you.’ Rennie cleared his throat with characteristic impatience. ‘By the way, I wasn’t kidding about it being bloody cold out here.’
‘Oh, sorry!’ Hastily Carmen buzzed him in, before racing through to the bedroom to swap her bath towel for a parrot-blue velour dressing gown. By the time she’d finished fastening the belt - tied with a double knot in case Rennie got boisterous - he’d arrived at her front door.
‘It’s really you! I can’t believe you’re here.’ Thrilled to see him, she hurled herself into his arms. ‘I thought you were in Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere . . .’
‘Somewhere with lots of vowels,’ said Rennie, hugging her hard in return. ‘I know, we were. Well, Illinois, same difference. They had to cancel the rest of the tour. Dave’s been hitting the bottle again and Andy’s snorting coke like a human Dyson. Neither of them were capable of doing their stuff on stage, and seeing as there was a drying-out clinic handy, Ed packed them both off there. So that’s it, I flew back last night. Thought I’d come and see how you’re doing. Now, stand back and let me take a good look at you.’
Ditto. Smiling, Carmen took in the almost shoulder-length dark hair, the deep tan, a wicked grin and those glittering dark-green eyes that always looked as though they were ringed with eyeliner - except they weren’t, that was just Rennie’s impossibly thick eyelashes. He was wearing a tan leather jacket, crumpled cream jeans, a faded brown polo shirt and the kind of hideous brass-buckled belt that only a cowboy would wear. But he was looking lean and fit, as ever. For as long as Carmen had known him, he’d exuded an air of health. The whites of his eyes were a clear blue-white, his tongue raspberry pink, his stomach washboard flat. The cowboy belt let the overall effect down badly, but Rennie wouldn’t allow that to bother him. If he liked something, he wore it, and that was that.
‘Stunning as ever,’ he pronounced at last, his brown hands on Carmen’s shoulders. ‘Anyway, I thought this was a respectable street.’
‘It’s a dressing gown! It’s completely done up,’ Carmen protested.
‘I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the street. I thought it was supposed to be dead posh around here.’
What with his touring commitments, combined with the fact that he’d spent the majority of the last three years out of the country, Carmen forgave him. Just.
‘Actually, it is dead posh.’
‘Sorry, it’s gone right downhill since I was here last. Rear Admirals, QCs, the silver spoon brigade - more pompous gits than you could shake a stick at in the good old days. Call the police as soon as look at you, they would. Answer the door to a stranger? Good grief, you must be joking.’
Patiently Carmen said, ‘Is there a point to this, or is it just a general off-the-cuff rant?’
‘Sweetheart, of course there’s a point.’ Heading through to the kitchen, Rennie opened the fridge and seized a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. ‘OK to open this?’
She hesitated. The bottle had been there for over two years. She’d bought it on the first anniversary of Spike’s death, along with several packets of paracetamol and Nurofen. The plan had been to spend the night at home alone, just for a change, and give herself until midnight to carefully think things through. If, when the clock chimed twelve, she decided there was no point in carrying on, she would finish the bottle of champagne then swallow the painkillers.
At eleven o’clock, with the bottle chilling nicely in the fridge, she had opened a writing pad and begun to compose a suicide note.
By midnight the wastepaper bin was piled high with scrunched-up sheets of paper. Mortified, Carmen had discovered that suicide notes weren’t as easy to write as she’d recklessly imagined. Everything she put down sounded ridiculous when she tried reading it aloud, like one of those really bad plays in the Morecambe and Wise shows Spike had so loved to watch on cable TV. Increasingly self-conscious and frustrated, Carmen realised how embarrassed she would be to leave behind the kind of suicide note people might secretly snigger at.
Furious with herself, she’d ended up putting the unopened bottle back into the fridge and making herself a cup of tea instead. Since flushing the painkillers down the loo would have been nothing but a criminal waste of painkillers, she’d stacked them in the bathroom cabinet to use in the recommended dose when her next period arrived.
Waste not, want not.
Well, if she was going to carry on living, she’d need them.
The champagne she’d left there in the fridge, however, as a salutary reminder.
What the hell. Carmen gestured at the bottle. ‘Good idea. You open it, I’ll get the glasses.’
‘And I’ll get back to my point,’ said Rennie, ‘which is that I arrived here two hours ago. You were out.’
‘I was at the shelter.’
‘That explains the smell.’ Rennie had never been one to keep his innermost thoughts to himself. Catching the look on Carmen’s face he grinned and said, ‘OK, OK, and it’s very noble of you to do your bit, but I’m just telling you, you do smell.’
The trouble was, she knew he was right. Exasperated, Carmen headed for the bathroom. ‘Open the bottle. I’ll be back in five minutes.’
Helpfully Rennie said, ‘Want a hand?’
‘You’re hilarious. Go and sit down in the living room. And don’t eat all my Thornton’s truffles.’
As she shampooed her hair and soaped her body in the steaming shower, Carmen marvelled at Rennie’s attitude to life. He had more energy than anyone she’d ever known, working hard and playing harder, always joking, incapable of not flirting with practically any girl who happened to cross his path. And, being Rennie, an awful lot crossed his path.
Rennie Todd, her brother-in-law. Spike’s younger brother. Apart from their smiles, no two brothers could have been less alike. Closing her eyes as rivers of shampoo cascaded down over her face, Carmen pictured Spike, her beloved husband, with his sparkling grey eyes, dark blond hair and tendency towards pudginess. Whereas Rennie crackled and fizzed with energy, Spike had always been the quieter, calmer member of the band, the couch potato physically. He’d thought more deeply about things, written songs with profoundly meaningful lyrics. Rennie, Carmen was fairly sure, had never had a profound meaningful thought in his life.
And he was still alive, that was another pretty significant difference between the pair of them. Rennie was dazzlingly alive and Spike was dead.