Chapter 9 Chez Blinkhorn #4
Archie seemed to lose interest in him, and Flynn found himself being herded along the hallway and propelled up the basement steps and out on to the pavement.
As he walked past the pink-lit windows, the lamps were turned off one by one, until the living room was in darkness.
A single window remained illuminated, and Flynn realized it must be the scullery because Cynthia’s face suddenly loomed into view.
The sink, he remembered, was beneath the window.
She was still doing the washing-up. She glanced up and caught sight of him and winked.
Somewhat baffled by this valediction, he could think of nothing else to do except wink back at her.
—
Walking in the cold night air sobered him up a little. Archie had been right—there were no taxis on the streets. It was deathly quiet, as if everyone had gone to bed early.
He encountered no one. No drunk rolling home, no coffee stall open for business—either early or late—no nightclub revellers staggering out after a night on the tiles.
With every disoriented step his nerves grew more jangled.
He began to develop the unnerving sense of a sinister presence.
Something—or someone—malign. His hackles rose.
A dog with another dog on his heels. Several times he thought he heard soft footsteps behind him, but when he turned to look there was only an old newspaper blowing around on a night breeze or an aloof cat picking its way along a wall.
He headed onwards, following a compass in his head, his ghostly companion still trailing after him.
It was strange, because Flynn knew London better than most and yet he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and found himself now on unfamiliar streets.
As he trudged on, the patently absurd idea began to grow in his addled brain (he had not, after all, sobered up as much as he had thought) that the Blinkhorns’ flat really had been an ante-room to hell and this was his final punishment—to wander for ever around the streets of London, accompanied only by an invisible spectral companion.
He wondered if he was going quietly mad.
Or was it perhaps some long-delayed after-effect of his beating the other night, or even his experiences during the war.
He stumbled through an unlit bombsite, the bricks and soil churned up, waiting to trip him in the dark.
Finally, he managed to negotiate his way out of this benighted quagmire and soldier on.
Searching in his pockets for his cigarettes, he found instead the beef sandwich.
He plucked out something else as well. Material of some kind.
A handkerchief? Not one of his—his handkerchiefs were a bleached white, sent along with his shirts to Yang’s.
He examined it beneath the light from a street lamp and recognized straight away the little red and blue Eiffel Towers.
Delphine Dubois’s scarf. The scarf was crumpled, not in the pristine state it had been in when tied fashionably around Delphine’s neck.
What’s more, it was stained with something dark and damp, although it was hard to make out what it was in the weak glow of the street light.
He caught the ghostly scent of her Shalimar perfume.
Something else, too—the ferric tang of blood.
He dropped the scarf in horror. Was it Delphine’s blood?
She had been wearing the scarf in the Lamb and Flag, so how had it arrived in his pocket?
Of course, he realized, the blood was not Delphine’s, it was from the wretched cow that had been sacrificed for dinner chez Blinkhorn.
The beef sandwich must have seeped into his pocket and stained the scarf.
Relief flooded his brain. Still, it didn’t solve the puzzle of why the scarf was in his pocket.
Were Frida’s suspicions correct—had Delphine come home with him after all?
Had she been in his bed? (Surely he would remember that?) The most likely explanation, he decided after some puzzlement, was that she had accidentally lost the scarf in the Lamb and Flag, and he had found it after she left and salvaged it for her.
He picked the scarf up from where it had fallen on the ground.
He could hand it back to Delphine when she returned to work.
He would have to tread carefully though, in case she had been to bed with him.
It would be best if she didn’t know that the act was lost in the dark pit of his amnesia.
He wondered what the French for “cad” was.
Then he imagined her horror if he handed it back to her in this condition and was suddenly gripped by a desire to get rid of it.
He wrapped the unwanted sandwich in the scarf before ducking into a deserted alleyway, where a row of dustbins were lined up.
He quietly raised the lid on one that seemed to belong to a restaurant, recoiling from the stink of fish that was released.
It would take a strong stomach to go raking around in that dustbin.
Flynn thrust the little unwanted parcel deep into the bin.
Like someone disposing of evidence, he thought.
—
When he eventually made it back to Romilly Street, he had hardly got inside his flat when his stomach heaved, and he had to rush to the scullery sink and retch up what remained of Mitzi’s cooking.
For a hallucinatory moment he thought he could see a small prawn swimming valiantly in the pool of his vomit.