Blind Date (27 page)

“What
was he like? Our suspect called Jack?” He hated to deceive, but knew it was necessary.

“Revolting, but somehow, he could be sympathetic, if you got beyond the filth. Kind, in his way. He needed a ruling passion, although any would have done. Destined for sterile pursuits, should have been an academic, a boffin, the kind who remained in some small society, free of worldly pressures. He reminded me of my father, in a way.”

She tapped out the ash among the dust, a delicate smoker.

Joe found himself nodding, one-enthusiastically, surprised by her accuracy.

“A little toad of a man. Fat, short of hair, sweating and smelling most of the time. Ignorant of social niceties, arrogant too. Short of the kind of benign, female influences which teach a boy to wash, at least, as well as change his shirt. They exist, these little moles, with pink snouts and thick skins. My father was a better version, I hasten to add, much better, but he was on that side of the line. Jack was further down the scale. He was pretty disgusting. And rendered incoherent by rejection, even though he wouldn't do anything to improve his chances. His fantasies about covering the face and brutalizing the body came from that. The fact he was plain and desperate for any kind of affection was the sort of thing which would have appealed to Emma. Not for the fantasies, of course: he didn't tell her those. Only for the pathos and the untouchability. I don't know how she met him. He lived near. She wouldn't have minded his oddity.”

Joe stood up,
ducked beneath a beam, rapped his knuckles against the second tenor bell, smelt the rot of the supporting wood. The breeze, undetectable at street level, made a whistling sound up here.

The bell made a dismal, tinny sound, like a cheap, unenthusiastic doorbell, unlike the bell for the clock, which gave off a sonorous, low key, DONG! when kicked, hard.

“When I hit this,” Joe said pointing vaguely to the nearest bell, “it means I'm asking why?”

She looked up towards the windows, sniffing with a kind of pleasure. Whatever had been engendered by yesterday's expedition and the memory of the chandelier was not lost. She drank a slug of coffee, tried to shrug her shoulders in a circular way, looser in the limbs than she had been, rejoicing in it. There were racing clouds and a blue sky.

“Because she was so hopelessly nice.”

“Tell me again. I'm sick of hearing it.”

Joe was on the prowl, ducking the beams, his boots crunching on the grit of the floor: strange bits of gravel, bird droppings which seemed to exist even without birds, dust which seemed to have formed a cloak for his feet. He knew why she wanted to live here.
He
wanted to live here. He felt a dizzying sensation of conviction. It was not the same as happiness, merely certainty. He looked out of the slats into a workaday world: strangely scaled down people, and his own vehicle, looking like a dinky toy, badly parked. He knew he would see something different from the east side, or the west. Who else could see a whole one hundred and eighty degrees? Way down there, a miniature woman tripped and stumbled on the pavement, clutched at a railing, looked at her shoe, cursed without voice, walked on. That was reality; not this.

“You
know, whenever I hear about Emma, I get bored. I want to put her in a book. What was she? The siren on the rocks with virtue? Such a sweetie. Like one of those statues. The model virgin with tears. Her death enough to reduce a nation to mourning and raise a monument, but that task left to her family, who made a plastic effigy of her memory. C'mon, twistneck. She can't have been such a paragon.”

“Cynic.”

“Me? Never.”

“Oh Lord, Joe, don't you believe in innocence? She was preserved like a precious stone. With the difference that she wasn't particularly bright. Fire without brightness. Kindness without discrimination.” More tapping of the ash and a long pause. Dead smoke descending on her hair, suiting her, like a form of angel dust.

“She couldn't judge, Joe. She didn't know the sick from the healthy, the weak from the strong, the good from the bad for that matter.”

It was her turn to get up, feel, touch, tap each bell in turn. The tracksuit she wore suited her fine. It hid the thinness and the pockets accommodated the cigarette packet and the good lighter, which he had noticed, creating a bulge against her hips.

“Which is why she was so vulnerable and we were so angry. Because she never noticed how rude or gauche anyone was; she liked them that way. She was truly tolerant. The perfect victim, who always loved people far more than they were worth.”

“Might
have been loved far more than she was worth,” Joe ventured, thinking to himself that this woman whose death had wrecked so many lives sounded to him beautifully deficient, not someone he would have liked. She sounded as boring as a badly researched saint, canonized for being mysterious, and her very existence made him angry enough to risk causing offence.

“She sounds to me like an over-privileged, over-endowed flirt.”

Elisabeth shook her head. “There are women who will drive men mad. Beautiful, impossible women. Men want them, women want them. Model beauty, torrential sexuality, all that. The stuff of famous courtesans and the mistresses of kings. Women who start wars and foster deadly rivalries. The kind of woman with an incandescant quality difficult to comprehend until you stand in the same room. Emma was not like that. Not the kind of woman whose murder you could understand. Emma didn't generate that response. Patsy might have done, once. … It required not only beauty of a special type, but ego.

“Ego,” she muttered, nudging the clock bell with her foot. “You have ego. Obdurate faith in self.

“Emma was spectacularly pretty,” she went on. “In a ballerina kind of way. Childishly exquisite, extremely self-willed, rather than powerfully sexy. She wanted to make amends.”

“For what? What had she ever done wrong?”

“Oh, you miss the point. Some people want to make amends not for their own deficiencies, but for everyone else's. They take a personal responsibility for righting wrongs, real or imagined. They listen with horror but without an ounce of scepticism to hard luck stories: they are drawn to misery in the belief they can put it right. Emma didn't believe there was anything which couldn't be changed; any person who couldn't be altered. She took on board the silliest of crusades, the most unlikely of people. She would've learned, but she hadn't yet.” Elisabeth laughed, a short bark of remembrance.

“If I
had hit a girl at school … which I did, temper never very certain, I would come home bawling and swearing that it was her fault, the cow, and I was never going to apologise, not I. Emma would find out and go and do the apologising on my behalf. Unbidden, I hasten to add. She did it when Mother was rude to people. She befriended the lonely guest in Mother's house: she would descend on the party wallflower, drag them in.”

“I'm sorry,” Joe interrupted, “she sounds insufferable. I'll just get some more coffee. So I can digest her.”

There was an art to these stone steps, so narrow at this level and so steep, there was a temptation to manage them on all fours. Or to creep up and down sideways, crab fashion, hands extended against the wall. Joe simply walked, bent double. Emma would have worried about his ability to manage two mugs without falling: Elisabeth did not. She leant by the window and thought what a privilege it was to watch the world without being watched. And she agreed with him, yes, Emma could be insufferable, with all that high-tuned sensitivity towards others which Emma could afford, because after all, she had never had to work. No, no, no, that wasn't the division. It was just that Emma's constant solicitude could irk and offend. Elisabeth had a vision of Emma, standing downstairs, looking round the place with the interested inspection of one who would not dream of saying anything negative, but thought it, all the same. You
must
do whatever you want, Liz, of
course
you must. And then, repeated invitations to
their
house for unwanted meals designed to guard against the cold and show, ever so gently, the benefits of a civilized life.

Enough:
he was back. Seeing him emerge through the undersized door was another revelation. First the head, ducked like an expert, then the long torso, then the longer legs. She had the sudden, happy thought, that the ideal candidate for these premises would have Joe's torso and arms, the better to pull the bells, together with tiny wee legs, in order to scale the steps without fuss.

He handed a thick mug of dark-brown brew. Doctors had told her to avoid caffeine. Doctors had told her to avoid everything. Joe kicked the central bell.

“Not a why,” he muttered, “but a
when.
When did you know that Jack was not the man who had killed her?”

Joe could not have told her how much he dreaded the reply. It mattered, desperately, just as any hesitation would count against her. There was none.

“I never knew while he was alive. I couldn't have gone through with it if I'd had the slightest doubt. Not the very slightest. Even when he was being nice, and he could be nice, I was utterly convinced. Couldn't have let him paw me, tell me his filthy fantasies, plan what we would do when we were through this self-imposed probation. If I felt pity for him then, it was a gleeful sort of pity, just you wait, buster, just you wait … and even when it was all over, the judge threw it out, branded me as a whore and Jack killed himself, I tried to make myself think, good riddance. But I knew later, when I had all the time in the world to think. Then I knew that I'd driven a man to his own death and all for nothing. How ironic. My last love affair. The greatest effort I had ever made to impress another living soul. For that. For his destruction and for mine. Oh yes, he deserved his revenge.”

“When?” Joe insisted. Then she hesitated. Dragged on the cigarette, sipped the coffee, wincing as it burned her mouth.

“You
want the specifics? As if all realizations have a single, cataclysmic moment? Instead of something which burns a hole before causing pain?” She stared at the cigarette in her long, thin fingers.

“When I was in the gutter. Drunk and burned. I felt that man press his knuckles into my eyes. I imagined this was the man who killed my sister. He took my rings and pressed them into my eyes. That was when I thought I knew. But I probably knew before that. After Emma's death, and before the acid.”

She smiled her crooked smile. “that's when things fell apart. Flesh from the bone, fuel from the spirit. There was nothing of me left. I have never, in the whole of my life, done a single wise or courageous thing.”

“And another man was accused of attacking you,” Joe said flatly. She looked at him with the pity of the schooled for the ignorant.

“He was not accused. He confessed. He had a pre-existence before me, a nuisance, easily believed. He probably saw something which made the confession stick, I don't know. I wasn't exactly in a position to intervene, and who would believe me if I had? I never saw him. All that happened was that it gave an excuse for them to put away a man who had begged to be put away. I am part of his repertoire now, he's proud of me. I said nothing, because even though I imagined I knew, that isn't the same thing as being sure. And … something else.”

Joe kicked the bell. Blood out of a stone, this was. He was confused with the whys and the whens and the wherefores.

“What else?”

She had her hands loosely clasped in her lap, sitting in the dust as demure as a lady at a tea party.

“Well,
I thought it might be Matthew. Which shows how mad I was.”

The hands fluttered, at a loss without the cigarette which gave them purpose. “Trying to stop me going away. I was wrong again, of course. But that's what I thought. For about three days, that's what I thought. Among other things.”

He stared at her. So cold, so contained, so controlled. So fucking twisted. Looking at him, and the bells, as if they were all under the same microscope. If only he did not like her.

“Patsy's man,” he croaked. “Could he be the man?”

“Possibly. He was going to cover her face. She said he asked her about her rings. She told us about her friend Angela wearing rings. That wasn't in the paper.”

“Angela Collier?” So much for him hiding the newspaper. She had known, long before Patsy had blurted it out. Elisabeth shook her head. “I don't know. Patsy said Angela wouldn't go to the agency. I think it's possible she did. Met the same man.”

“Warn them.”

She leant forward, retrieving the coffee cup from the floor. They were practically nose to nose.

“Of what, oh wise one? Of what? My fantasy?”

“A man,” he said weakly. “Just another man.”

He nudged the nearest bell not aggressively but affectionately, one last time. The wooden support creaked ominously and he stepped away. She stood in front of it, stroking the surface, as if out of all of the bells, it was her own.

“Better tart myself up,” he said. “Make an appointment. Find a wife.”

“Tart us both up, then. If you're going to that agency, so am I.”

He looked at her, and looked away. Shifty.

Her feeling
of trust, as if she had known him forever, was such a relief, she could not quite bring herself to ask
why
, Joe. Why should you? She could not spoil the relief, even though whatever he had told
her
was so incomplete. She had to trust him and reason why, later. There was no-one else.

“What are you going to tell me, Joe?” she said, sadly. “That no-one would believe that a girl who looks like me could dare to be a lonely heart?”

T
he day after
her Select Friend debacle, Hazel had another envelope, in her hand, when Patsy phoned, first thing, talking about not coming into work. Hazel had muttered about how there was no need to give any more reminders about how no-one was indispensable and what about the bloody police, who were still there? The thought that she, Hazel Turner, could do Patsy's job, with her hands tied behind her back, had become recurrent, and although Hazel did not entirely approve of herself for thinking thus, it was a school of thought encouraged by their management who found senior personnel expensive. Perhaps this might be a point in her life when she should forget about men for a year or three and concentrate on ambition. Men were not nice. They were not suitable for more than one purpose; they were a drag on the rations. All the same, the buttermilk envelope was tantalizing. It contained not one profile, but two.