Elsie’s voices again, and as I walked, I looked through the little windows in each of the doors. It wasn’t until I got to the kitchens that I found him. He was standing by one of the trays of sandwiches, taking something out of his pocket.
‘He’s trying to poison us.’
Jack walked us back to my flat. I told him it wasn’t necessary. I was so sure it wasn’t necessary, I told him before he’d even offered, but he would insist.
‘Why on earth would he do that?’ Elsie took off her coat and commandeered her usual seat by the fireplace. ‘What possible reason would Ronnie have to poison anybody? You’re going off on one of your tangents again.’
‘What was he doing in there, then, tampering with the food?’ I went straight to the window and pulled the curtains to. ‘Why was he in the kitchens?’
‘He was probably helping himself to another sandwich,’ she said. ‘Or looking for extra milk. They never give you enough, do they? They skimp on everything.’
‘We’re not allowed in the kitchens.’ I sat in the other armchair and glanced back at the curtains. There was a slice of daylight pushing through a gap in the material. ‘It says so on the door. It says staff only. Everything is recorded for training and monitoring purposes. Perhaps they recorded him in the kitchens. They might have monitored him. Perhaps we should ask.’
Elsie pinched the little space between her eyes and I glanced at the window again.
Jack reached across and pulled the curtains tighter. ‘Is that better?’ he said, and I nodded. ‘Now, let’s take a step back and think about the best thing to do.’
‘A light might be an idea,’ said Elsie. ‘I can’t see a thing in here now.’
I only realised when I switched the lamp on, when the glow from the bulb stretched into the corners of the room. I’d been too busy worrying about the sandwiches to notice.
‘The elephant,’ I said.
We all looked at the mantelpiece.
The elephant had disappeared.
‘Ninety-seven?’ Handy Simon looked for a chair to lower himself into, but there wasn’t one available. ‘Ninety-seven?’ he said again.
‘Ninety-seven.’ Miss Ambrose stabbed at the manila folder with her index finger. ‘He doesn’t look ninety-seven. Can you believe it?’
Simon screwed his face up into thinking. He thought about his grandfather, who had been in the St John’s Ambulance until well into his eighties, and the woman from the corner shop who fought off a gang of hooligans with just a walking stick and a phrase she’d heard on the television.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
Miss Ambrose repeated, ‘Can you believe it?’ and Simon realised it was the sort of question people ask when they’re not actually looking for a well-reasoned answer, but they just want someone else in the room to agree with them.
‘No,’ he said, and unscrewed his face again. ‘No, I can’t.’
Simon looked out into the day room. Miss Ambrose’s office had glass partitions, but they were the kind with a grid all the way across, and it always felt as though you were viewing life through a chessboard. After Justin had packed away his accordion, most of the residents had drifted into the television room, and Gabriel Price sat with his back to them, on one of the hard chairs usually reserved for the staff. He was facing the screen, but from the angle of his head, it was obvious he was looking somewhere else.
‘There’s something fishy going on,’ Miss Ambrose was saying. ‘Something I can’t quite put my finger on.’
Miss Ambrose and her finger weren’t particularly reliable, it had to be said. Miss Bissell, on the other hand, could put her finger on anything, day or night, with the most breathtaking accuracy.
‘Perhaps we should ask Miss Bissell.’
As soon as Simon heard the words, he realised they were the wrong ones. It sometimes felt as though there was a giant hole between his brain and his mouth, and there was nothing in place to stop all his thoughts falling through it.
‘We don’t need to bother Miss Bissell with everything, do we, Simon?’
Simon thought about answering, but decided it was safer to opt for shaking his head instead.
‘Keep an eye on him.’ She nodded through the chessboard. ‘And while you’re at it, keep an eye on everyone else as well. Florence Claybourne has been acting most peculiarly in recent days. Perhaps it’s about time we had her assessed for Greenbank.’
And so Handy Simon became a Mata Hari. Which filled him with both self-importance and self-loathing, all in the same moment.
Simon had never been a big fan of responsibility. He had spent most of his life ducking around corners to get out of its way, even though there had been times over the years when it had chased him across the horizon for all he was worth.
He walked across the courtyard towards the car park, and his trainers pushed a path through the gravel. The engine started just as the clock clicked to half past, and a weather forecast sprang from the radio and tumbled around the car. Grey. Overcast. Becoming colder. When he drove out of the main gates, he knew the woman with the Patterdale terrier would be watching the traffic on the pedestrian crossing, and the man in the four-by-four would be lighting his cigarette as he waited. At the bottom of the road, the butcher would be pulling trays from a window, and the woman from the fruit and veg shop would be carrying an A-board before she disappeared it through a doorway. If the first set of lights was green, it meant Simon would only be able to glance at the windows of the car showroom and not stare for a full three minutes. But if he managed to get into second gear by the time he reached the florist, he would get through the second set of lights without them changing back to red. He would remember to swerve to avoid the pothole just after the park gates, and if he was lucky, he would pull into a space right outside the takeaway. The man behind the counter would say, ‘Good evening, Mr Simon,’ and hand him a white plastic bag, and neither of them would say another word to each other until the following week. Simon would eat his food on the settee that evening. His mother was no longer there to stop him, and although the novelty had long since worn away, he still remembered her each time he did it. Afterwards, he would put the white plastic bag and the empty cartons in the pedal bin, and switch out the lights in the kitchen. For a moment, he would stare at the clock on the microwave, and listen to the fridge humming to itself in a linoleum quietness. It never took Simon very long to get to sleep, but that night he would lie in bed and think about the theatre of strangers who made up his days, and he would wonder, perhaps, if they sometimes thought about him too. Because it somehow feels as though everyone is connected to everyone else, even though they perhaps don’t realise it, and he finds the idea strangely reassuring, but Simon would be asleep before he could really work out why.
I saw Elsie look at Jack. There was less doubt in her eyes
