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Richard Poole stood at his kitchen sink, overlooking the featureless back garden of his modest row house in Croydon on a sunny late Saturday morning in early spring, and humming tunelessly. Just now he didn’t mind the dreary, restricted view; yesterday’s rain had washed even his small corner of the world clean and shining.
He was watching his wash basin fill up with somewhat hot, soapy water. Every now and then he slipped in a particularly crusted dish and idly observed how the suds began to color with the residue.
While his body was relaxed to a degree not known to it since childhood, Poole’s mind was actually far afield, reaching back into the dim past of yesterday afternoon, the last time he had stood here and coaxed water from his jaded PlumbNation system for the tea things. He really should not have let the supper dishes dry unwashed overnight, but then, the cause was probably more than sufficient . . .
Yesterday
DI Poole had been back in London from his Caribbean secondment now for several months: back in his little suburban row house with the typical stand-offish family on one side and the Polish lady with the marauding cat on the other; and back at his old office, that uninspired pile of shoeboxes done up in red brick in downtown Croydon, now blessedly free of Doug Anderson and his mates. His old super had also moved on, and the new one, a shrewd, practical woman fresh from the North, seemed willing enough to ignore whatever calumnies against Poole’s name might still be creeping about the venerable London nick. She knew something of his past, and Anderson’s, and was far more interested in keeping her officer complement up to strength than she was about either one of them. Things were better, distinctly better, then they used to be on the Job.
Then, late one Friday evening, in a driving rainstorm some time after tea and some time yet before supper, Camille Bordey had turned up on his doorstep with the fantastically contrived explanation that her flight to Paris from Gatwick had been grounded, then cancelled altogether, and she had no place to stay.
Poole had closed his front door against the weather and the retreating cab and looked at Camille shivering in her abbreviated jacket and capris, dripping rainwater on his formerly pristine front hallway rug. “It doesn’t work that way,” he told her. “Guadeloupe to London by way of Paris, not Guadeloupe to Paris by way of London.”
“Oh,” Camille had replied, and stealthily heeled her little carpet bag of travel clothes under the hall tree behind her. “Well, if you don’t have room –”
“I didn’t say that,” Poole had put in quickly. “Not exactly.”
Then he’d made a conscious effort to stop looking at the way her wet clothes clung to her, cleared his throat and said quite sternly “Get out of that blouse – I mean, those wet things,” he corrected hastily. “You’re soaking. Come on, chop-chop! You’ll catch your death!” using a phrase he’d heard his mum repeat all through his childhood.
Camille hid her smirk as Richard directed her upstairs to the hot shower, while he remained below and put together an improvised feed, with plenty of sweet, hot tea.
Over leftover chips and curry, Camille gave him all the Saint-Marie news, and ended by explaining how she had wrangled a whole week off from the new DI. Poole had gone on about plane reservations, and how before he saw her off to Paris, he’d squire her around the local shops for the essential things she had unaccountably failed to bring with her. He quizzed her on how long she was to remain in Paris and ruminated on whether it would be possible for him to join her there for a day or so, when whatever she was doing there was over – joining her only reluctantly, of course, since it was France they were talking about. And all the while he was at this discourse, she sat at his kitchen table, nibbling on the food with a quiet, mysterious smile.
It was a bit unnerving.
For tonight, Camille was to sleep in Poole’s bed, while he would make do on the remarkably uncomfortable sofa in the sitting room downstairs. At least, that was the plan.
It quickly went west when he turned around from setting out his pillow and comforter on the sofa to see Camille staring at him from the armchair across the coffee table, chin in hand, his favorite extra-large T shirt about to slide off one bare shoulder, and her long, exquisite legs extended, the naked toes digging impatiently into the ottoman.
“Richard?” she whispered, and he knew instantly what was about to happen.
He had made some effort to stave off the inevitable. He had sighed, sat gingerly on the ottoman next to the toes, and asked her honestly if she was actually trying to seduce him. Her answer was a look he easily interpreted as ‘Don’t be stupid, of course I am,’ and a tug at his hand as she slid her toes to the carpet and rose gracefully. The shirt slipped off-shoulder entirely.
“I was trying to be a gentleman,” he complained, not too loudly, as she led him upstairs. Which was how the supper things had come to be left unwashed.
Today
Now, on the Saturday, he was at his kitchen sink, finally addressing his washing-up issues, when two gentle hands lit just over his shoulder blades and smoothed his half-buttoned shirt down over the lumbar region. A slender, beautifully symmetrical female body pressed itself into his back as two equally symmetrical arms circled his torso to caress him, and a light humming of satisfaction vibrated into his left shoulder.
“No fair,” he said, contentedly. “I’ve got my hands in the dishwater.”
“But I’m happy,” Camille Bordey murmured.
Poole swished water in his dishpan with one hand and slipped in the flatware with the other. “And why are you so happy, then?” he asked.
Camille snuggled closer, held him tighter. “I am in your house, we have made love and you are doing the washing up. There is no way a woman could be happier than that!”
“Oh, I can think of one way,” he told her.
“Oh?” she purred. “And what is that, hein?”
Poole slipped a dish towel up off the counter and flipped it over his shoulder, over her head. “Start drying.”
“Reechard!”
“Don’t ‘Reechard’ me, love, it has to be done.”
Camille would have protested more, were it not for the use of that one word. She eased back, shook the towel off her curls and stealthily began to twist it in her hands. “Am I?” she asked, cooing still.
“Are you what?”
“Your love.”
“You know you are. I hope I spent enough time last night proving that.”
“Oh, I think not ‘enough’,” she murmured, drawing further back. “Not nearly enough, Detective Inspector.”
Richard did not glance around at her. “And I wouldn’t snap that towel, Detective Sergeant, if you know what’s good for you,” he announced.
Camille snickered, her heart skipping with happiness, and took up her snapping stance, only to see Richard wheel around sharply. She squealed, the towel went flying and the next she knew she was in his arms, his wet hands leaving imprints in her light tropical blouse.
This was too good to fight. Her arms were on their way around his neck when the sight of two large green eyes behind Richard’s head gave her pause, just for a moment. “We are being watched,” she whispered, before closing on him.
“It’s just Jasper,” he whispered back, after they had finished that kiss and before he started the next one.
Camille hummed into his mouth, then squirmed away with a giggle as he tried to prolong it. “And who is Jasper?”
“Belongs next door,” Poole muttered, pulling her closer. “With Mrs Thing.”
Camille dodged him, peering over his level shoulder at the fierce glare from beyond the window pane. “Your neighbor’s name is ‘Thing’?” she asked.
Poole brought her attention back to him with a sure touch to her chin. “It’s Trebowska or something,” he told her. “’Thing’ is just . . . easier –” and he kissed her firmly.
Camille melted into him, uncaring that an orange marmalade cat the size of a young tiger was sitting on the kitchen window ledge, watching every movement.
A wise animal, this Jasper. He was boss cat of the block, save for this house. He had been trying for weeks now to gain an entry by this kitchen door, but he had always been rebuffed – kindly, mind you, but decidedly. So, he had taken to sitting on its back window sill of a morning to observe the doings within. Just now he was sorting through the perceptions streaming through his marauder’s mind, processing a scene he had never witnessed before . . . What was this: attack? Play? Perhaps eating?
Poole broke the kiss, executed two more swift ones and held his darling close enough to gaze into her shining eyes. “Do you know, I’m happy as well,” he told her, a note of wonder in his voice. “Here, in this house, in Croydon, with you, I’m happy. Goes to prove you can be happy anywhere.”
“Mmm,” Camille agreed, snuggling in. “And now we are agreed we can be happy, what then?”
“Sorry?”
“What shall we do today?”
“We get ready for –” Poole began, then realized, as he should have long before, that Paris was only the excuse. He was the reason Camille was here.
“Ah. Well, then,” he went on, over her giggles, “I think I may have just the thing.”
------
Mrs Nikola Trzebiatowska, eighty-some years old and the widow of a journeyman plumber, had lived in her English row house for almost a decade now, alone save for her cat Jasper. She was wedged between a raucous Kazakh family on the one side and a quiet but suspicious Englishman on the other. The Kazakhs were all right; at least, she understood their constant rowing and continual coming and goings. They were entertaining. But in all her years in the street, she had never known the Englishman to have anyone in, except repairmen, and she had kept a vigilant watch. He was an obvious misfit, even if he was supposed to be a policeman. It was unnatural for a man of that age to be living alone. She had often mentioned it in his hearing.
Then, yesterday, she had just happened to be looking out her sitting room window at the rain when a cab came splashing up their narrow street and a strange woman had rushed from it to his front door: no coat, no proper boots, only a carpet bag for luggage. Mrs Trzebiatowska had clearly seen this woman enter the Englishman’s house and it was only now, in the damp but bright sunshine of the following afternoon, that she saw them leave it. Both of them. Together.
“I don’t own a car,” Nikola heard the Englishman say, in his usual precise, uncomplaining tones. “It’s unnecessary with the new –”
“We will take the bus,” the foreign woman told him, in a voice like liquid toffee. She was dressed, unsurprisingly, in much the same clothing she had arrived in.
“As I was saying, the new tram line passes right by the end of the street,” the Englishman was protesting. “It runs right up to North End . . .”
“We will take the bus,” the woman insisted. “I want to ride on the top floor and see all Croydon at my feet!”
“It’s the ‘upper deck’, actually. And how do you mean, ‘at your feet’?” the Englishman shot back as they hurried away toward the bus stop.
“At your feet then, my macaron!”
“Now look, we’re in public! You can’t . . .” fading away as they began to trot.
Croydon Police Station was barely visible in the distance when the bus dropped them at Park Street. From there Poole led his guest firmly by the hand west to the High Street, then north to the neat brick-paved plaza at the corner of High and Church Streets. It flowed northward into a wide pedestrian walkway paved in the herringbone pattern, lined with brand-name outlets and haunted by pigeons. Stretches of paving in the center were planted with bicycle racks, benches set under trees just beginning to unfurl ripe buds, and even red telephone boxes. Hand in hand they meandered about, amid shoppers of all races clutching trademarked bags, peering into this window and that. Poole’s least-stressed credit card was securely in his inside pocket.
Eventually, in the sun-striped square between Whitgift and Centrale, right beside the balloon seller, Poole stopped and swept an arm around, indicating the shops.
“Well, Camille?”
“Well?” She stepped closer, twinkling up at him.
He cleared his throat, suddenly unsure. “This is North End, the shopping center of town. All the best in Croydon. What do you fancy? Really,” he added, earnestly, “anything you need.”
She looked at him pityingly. “Richard. I have what I need.”
“But –” he began. The spring was still thinking about being winter, and if she didn’t have a coat . . . Poole realized she would not stay forever, but if you had a warm coat hanging in my front hall you might be tempted to come back, someday.
Camille kissed him quickly, before he could protest. “Let’s just walk,” she suggested.
They wandered back south to Church Street, an ordinary urban road, thoroughly conscious of its unsuitability to boast anything remarkable at all. They turned west, and the brick of the plaza soon shrunk back into plain asphalt cut with tram tracks. But very soon, at a corner just like any other, Poole suddenly veered south, pulling Camille into another world.
“Surrey Street Market,” he said. “First chartered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, circa the Year of Our Lord 1236. Or seven.”
It was a faded asphalt lane, narrowed further by paving stones on each side, bordered by ordinary shops, crowded with booths of many varieties and colors and swarming with people of all nationalities and dress, far more than two walkers could hope to avoid. Poole and Camille wound their way slowly, now losing and now finding each other again, amid the smells of coffee, fish and new-baked bread. Around them rank on rank of fresh fruit bloomed cheek-by-jowl with plump vegetables, whole cheeses, meat and fresh herbs and flowers, both cut and planted in flats, ready to take home.
“The Dog and Bull,” Camille half-heard Richard mutter in her ear at one point. “Oldest pub in Croydon, old as the charter, probably. Fancy a pint?”
The market was not quite as posh and extensive as its Parisian counterparts, in Camille’s unspoken opinion, but it did have - besides home brew, fudge and other sweets - handmade jewelry, handbags, tables of discounted shoes and . . .
“Dresses!” breathed Camille.
“But –!” said Poole, remembering the upscale offerings she had spurned in North End, and then he let her go in among the racks of frocks, skirts and jeans, as he concentrated on getting that card at the ready.
------
It was hours before they returned (Mrs Trzebiatowska had been counting), and afternoon was declining gently into dusk, but when they did it was in a cab burdened with several grocery parcels and an overstuffed retail bag.
The Englishman handed the foreign woman out of the taxi as gallantly as any duke would his duchess, and Mrs Trzebiatowska saw the woman now wore a beautiful
rust-colored coat with matching bootlets – second hand from Debenhams, Nikola was sure. Once the woman’s feet were firmly on the pavement the Englishman’s long chin was caught and he was kissed, hard, as the smirking cabman pulled away. This Nikola Trzebiatowska witnessed from her front step as she stood, staring rather blatantly, and clutching a broom in one hand as a sort of excuse for being there.
“I was prepared to hate this place for the way they treated you, mon amour,” she heard the woman say, as she kept the man’s chin firmly in one hand. “But I see the rotten apple does not infect the barrel.”
“‘Spoil’ the – no, no, you’re right,” the Englishman replied. “After today, I don’t know that I could ever dislike anyone here again.”
Then he realized they were being watched, but rather than create about it he coughed down a blush and turned toward the occupied stoop. “Oh, er, good evening, Mrs, uh, Trebowska.”
“Trzebiatowska,” that lady corrected, purely by habit, as she was equally too shocked at the display of affection and too busy gawking at the stunning foreign woman to be indignant about it.
Poole noticed that, too. “This is my friend Camille. She’s from that little island I told you about.” (He was almost sure he had once told Mrs Um where he had been in the years his bins had not been put out.) “Camille, this is Mrs ah, Mrs Tzeb – Mrs T, my neighbor. She owns Jasper, you’ve seen Jasper.”
Camille couldn’t resist. “Ah, Yasper!” she fluted, watching Mrs Trzebiatowska’s shocked face become even more shocked, “Oui, oui, le grand tigre! Magnifique!” She blew a kiss to the slackening breeze, to Mrs T’s horror.
Poole might have attempted to bring the conversation back to ordinary English standards, if something of Camille’s buoyant mood had not suddenly snapped a metaphorical towel at him. “We’ve been shopping; supper to get, you know,” he blurted out. “She – that is, Camille says she’s going to make chicken. I’m going to bake a cake.”
“Reecharr,” Camille purred, shaking her head at him sadly. “He says he can bake cake,” she went on knowingly to Mrs T, toning down the exaggerated French but not her Frenchness.
Mrs Trzebiatowska could only continue gaping, silently.
“Actually, I won an award at Malbrook Secondary for my cake,” Poole announced, his tone almost cool now. “It’s your chicken I have my doubts about.”
“Oh?” Camille huffed, flourishing the retail bag. “Don’t believe him, madame! My bonne maman is a great chef, and she taught me all she knows!”
“Really?” Poole huffed back. “We’ll see about that. Good evening, Mrs Trz-, Mrs T. Supper, you know. Oh,” he went on, turning back from his front step. “Just so you know, I ah, I may be away again, for a few days. Paris,” he went on, and tossed off a semi-Gallic shrug. “Nice any time of year.”
Camille made sure her new coat swirled around her calves in the manner proper to a catwalk model as she mounted the step to Poole’s front door, her bag of Surrey Street Market swinging in her hand. “Good evening, Madame T. So pleasant to meet you at last.”
“Yes, good evening,” Poole added, juggling the shopping to get a hand free for his key. “If we see Jasper we’ll send him along.” And then as he unlocked and threw open his door, Nikola heard him say, and not in an undertone, “You realize I have tasted your mum’s chicken, Camille?”
With the door shut behind them, Mrs Trzebiatowska never heard her stiff, solitary neighbor say to his exotic visitor as he hung up her new coat on his hall tree, “Do you know, that was the best conversation I’ve ever had with her.”
Into tomorrow
Midnight had come and Nikola Trzebiatowska, now unaccountably Mrs T, had retired in bafflement to her first floor bedroom well away from the street. Jasper had been allowed his night-time liberty as usual, but instead of hightailing it up to the top of the bin, to the roof of the shed and from there over the wall to the next street, he had slunk to the back of the house beside his own. Light still paved a golden pathway from the window to the unremarkable depths of DI Poole’s so-called garden. Jasper simply followed his nose up the yellow road to the kitchen door, stretched his impressive length up against it and caught his claws at the handle.
Camille opened it, with the hand not holding the nightcap. “It’s Jasper, mon cher,” she called back into the warm, cozy room. “He wants some chicken!”
Poole was just finishing the wash-up, emptying the dishpan down the drain. “Not that chicken he doesn’t,” he said decidedly. “Oh, let him in, he can have some scraps. We’ve got cake enough to last forever.”