When he felt his nose hairs start to burn, he stood up, pulled down the handle, and pushed. Time to get working on a new business plan.
But the door wouldn’t move.
It felt like no one ever used the sauna but him. Another pointless facility, another waste of cash. He banged on the door, yelled until his throat hurt. In space, no one can hear you scream. The same could be said of a sauna at an old people’s home. He might as well have been in a capsule, floating through the cosmos.
A sauna was a pleasant place to be, as long as you chose to be there. The second you wanted to leave but couldn’t, it became an unbearable nightmare.
He knew he’d been murdered and, as death approached, he knew who’d done it. How could he have been so stupid?
Giles spent his final moments before passing out trying to remember the difference between a raisin, a sultana, and a currant. What was a prune? Was it a dried plum? And what would they call Giles Temple when they found his shriveled corpse?
Thirty-Six
When the groupmoved indoors and went their separate ways, Catherine and Geoffrey found themselves taking the lift together, alone. Had he engineered it that way? Had they both? It had been that way in Catherine’s university days. Something would be building with a boy and you’d just find yourselves, through an unsaid agreement, side by side.
Geoffrey opened his mouth to speak, paused, then let out the sentence that was on his mind.
“Catherine, would you like a cup of tea? In my flat? Or coffee?”
Catherine opened her mouth to speak but Geoffrey couldn’t stop talking.
“If you don’t want tea or coffee I don’t have any wine but I do have some whiskey, which I got for Christmas, although if you like ice with your whiskey I’m not really an ice person so I don’t have any in the freezer, I’m afraid. I think they sell ice in shops now. Would you like me to go and get you some ice from the shops?”
“A cup of tea would be lovely, thank you, Geoffrey.”
Geoffrey nodded and smiled. He looked nice when he smiled, thought Catherine. There was nothing conventionally attractive about him—the bags under his eyes were almost as big as his eyes themselves. But at Catherine’s age she was beyond aesthetics. She could see behind his eyes, and behind his eyes Geoffrey looked…nice.
At Geoffrey’s place, Catherine felt strangely at home. She recognized the clock on the wall as one she’d had in the eighties. Geoffrey talked at length about how a number of errors had been made in the electrical wiring of Sheldon Oaks. Switches were in the wrong places; problems were being stored up; the legacy of EU overregulation hung over British buildings like a bad smell. Catherine found that, if you ignored everything he said, his voice was comforting. A man’s voice. Even if they were talking complete rubbish, there was a security, she thought, in the certainty that men projected.
Her phone pinged with a text, and she took it from her handbag. Margaret:The police have arrested Polly Slaughter for Desmond’s murder! lol
And then another text came:Sorry ive just remembered my££ nephew told me lol doesn’t mean lots of love. Not lol. Meet in the bistro in ten minutes???send text£
Catherine relayed the news to Geoffrey.
“Polly Slaughter, eh?”
“Margaret wants to meet in the bistro. I suppose she wants to discuss what comes next.”
“Well, I’d imagine if Polly’s charged, she’ll get out on bail pending a trial,” said Geoffrey. “Although considering that would send her back here, to the scene of the crime, perhaps they’ll keep her on remand. Gosh. Polly Slaughter—on remand!”
“I think Margaret means what comes next with us. And our investigation.”
“Right,” said Geoffrey. “I see. Well, I’m sure there’s a lot to be looked into. How she did it. Why. Are there any holes in their case? Are we sure they have the right man? Woman. Right woman.”
“Mmm.”
They sat in a beat of silence, looking into each other’s eyes.
“Catherine, how would you feel aboutnotgoing down to meet Margaret?”
Catherine shrugged. “I don’t have to.”
“Why don’t you stay here with me and watchThe World at War? I have the whole series on DVD. All twenty-six episodes. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that we…”
“That would be lovely.”
And so they sat on Geoffrey’s sofa and watched episode one, which was about the rise of the Nazis. Geoffrey couldn’t stop himself from chipping in with his own analysis.
