Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) (5 page)

‘What?’
He stared her out. ‘You got a problem?’

‘No,
Dad. No problem.’

The
kettle’s whistle broke the silence. She poured water into two mugs.

‘What
I want to know is, what did that cow think, sending you over to me? She knows I can’t claim for you?’

‘It
weren’t like that, Dad.’ She stirred sugar into his tea, passed it across to him.

‘You’re
a good girl,’ he said, again.

She
sipped her tea in silence. Then she said, ‘Hank’s Tower, was it? Last night?’

He
shrugged.

‘Don’t
know what it is with that place,’ she said. ‘Tobias is always going down there too. His experiments, he says. Far as I can see all he does is stand at the top and throw stuff off it. Stones and that. And it’s dangerous, innit, there’s signs up there saying keep out, I’m always warning him…’

‘Dangerous,’
he repeated. He seemed not to have heard her.

‘And
anyway,’ she said, ‘it weren’t like that with Mum and you know it. She didn’t send me here so you could get benefits. It was me who wanted to come here – ’

‘Yeah,
and it leaves her free to live at my expense with her fucking pimp too – ’

‘Dad
– ’

‘She’s
always got her own way, that one. They tried to warn me – ’

‘Dad
– I came here because – ’

‘Selfish
bitch. Always was. Always will be. I should have listened…’

‘I
came here because I wanted to be with you.’ Her last word was a sob.

He
looked up at her. She stood there, under the low roof, with tears in her eyes.

‘Baby
girl…’ he tried to say.

She
turned away. ‘Don’t matter,’ she said.

‘Babes…’
he tried. He watched her for a moment. Then he drained his tea, noisily. ‘I’ll go and get gas,’ he said. He got to his feet. ‘Did the feds ask about the van?’

She
still had her back to him. ‘No,’ she said.

‘I’ll
take the car just in case,’ he said. ‘I’ll get us some chips too, eh? You’d like that, baby, wouldn’t you?’

She
shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said.

‘I
haven’t eaten for hours.’ He pulled on his coat. ‘Those van fucking Mielens,’ he was saying, ‘and they’re still too mean to give Digby a decent send-off. Still, all that will change now, eh Baby? You and me, we’ll have money now, won’t we?’

She
sniffed, dabbing at her cheeks with her fingers.

‘Won’t
be long, babes.’

The
caravan door rattled as he shut it behind him.

She
waited until the roar of his car engine had faded. She went outside, stood by the tow bar of the caravan. She rested one hand on the tow bar. In her mind, the first few bars of piano music. In her mind, she was wearing pink, like Miss Helen at the Centre, with her hair pinned up and shoes with points and everything. And third position. And point, and close, and point…

It
was quiet outside the caravan. Soon she’d hear the return of his car. But for now there was calm, and light, and the thought of satin shoes.

Chapter Three

The
sea is a soft background sound in the wide, light room.

My
studio, Helen thought, looking at herself in the mirror, her right arm balanced on the barre. My ballet studio.

Once
there was a real studio, a real ballet company, and me, a part of it, and the mirrors reflected us layered in cardigans and leg warmers and our feet in pink.

Now
there is just me. Alone. Silent. Silent, that is, apart from the sea.

She
placed her hand on the barre. And
plié
en
seconde
. And rise, and down. And fifth,
plié
, rise -

She
stopped and crossed the room to the CD player.

And
all because I followed my husband, she thought. All because I said, yes, to Chad, yes of course we can move from here, leave the city, take up a new parish on the coast, if that’s what they want you to do. If that’s what you want to do.

She
pressed a button on the CD player. A few sparse piano notes filled the air. She returned to the barre. It had been a condition of the move that one of the huge empty reception rooms in the vicarage would be converted into a room for her, with a floor and barre and mirrors…

Battement
tendu
. And point, and close…

Her
arms were fluid in their movement, her face fixed in concentration. Questions hovered, several questions, in fact, that she might have asked herself. Was it, in the end, what Chad had wanted to do? She hoped he was happier here. In the nearly six months since they had moved, it was difficult to tell.

He
gave no indication of being unhappy, she thought, turning to face the other way, placing her feet in first position. He seemed busy in his work as the new priest in this quiet parish by the sea, no less busy than he had been back in the inner city with its noise and life.

She
wanted him to be happy. Six years ago, he’d asked her to marry him, standing in the rain outside his church in Hackney, at the end of an evening which had started with a broken-down bus which meant they didn’t get to the film they’d planned to see, a French new wave thing, she remembered now, they’d always meant to get the DVD but never had. And then dinner in a Thai restaurant, in which he’d confessed to never having eaten crab before, ever, or lobster for that matter, or squid. She’d laughed. Mussels? Oysters? He’d shaken his head. ‘Why?’ she’d asked him, laughing still. ‘I think my mother thought they were fancy foreign things,’ he said. ‘Something to do with the French. And the war. Like rare steak. Or fresh cream cakes. And my father thought they were unclean,’ he’d said, and blushed.

‘Unclean?’
she’d asked him, ‘like, not kosher? But you’re not Jewish.’

In
answer, he’d described his father. A man of strong and rather selective Biblical beliefs, who married late and not very happily, produced two sons of which he was probably, quietly, very proud but never showed it. An upright Christian man, for whom God was more the vengeful God of wars and smiting than the God of love and forgiveness. A man who sent his sons to boarding school rather than admit that his own schooling had been torment…

‘And
was it torment for you too?’ she’d asked.

‘Yes,’
he’d said. ‘But probably not as bad as it had been for Father.’

She’d
heard herself ask, ‘How did you keep your faith?’

‘I
don’t know,’ he’d said.

There
had been a silence, and then the conversation had drifted back to the shallows; his first taste of prawn, (he wasn’t sure if he didn’t agree with his mother after all), the next film they ought to see, should the Number Thirty-Eight bus be working after all, the dance show that she was about to open in, a modern ballet set to a minimalist score…

‘You
know,’ he’d said, ‘before I met you, I knew nothing about dance. Or minimalism.’

‘Or
prawns,’ she’d said.

He’d
reached across the table and grasped her hand.

Leaning
on the barre, now, with the piano notes falling softly around her, she remembered how he’d turned to her, later that evening, standing at the gate of his church. He’d said to her that all through his childhood, somehow, in the face of his father’s diminished and mean-minded God, he had always had a sense of another way of thinking about it all, a way of love and beauty and warmth and generosity, and that even with no evidence, it was enough to hope that the world might turn on such things. And that through her he’d come to see that it was true. And that what he hoped more than anything was that she might agree to spend her life with him.

‘You’re
asking me to marry you?’ she’d said. Incredulous first, then pleased, delighted - ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘Yes, I will.’

She
stepped away from the barre and stood in the middle of the room.

And
we were happy. For a long time, we were happy. But now…

Was
she happy teaching dance rather than performing it, her classes of little girls at Miss Dorothy’s School of Dance during the week, with the occasional boy, or the haphazard collection of teenagers at the Community Centre at weekends?

And
why, every day, without fail, was she to be found in her studio, practicing her barre work, when a glance in the mirror would show you a woman in her late thirties, chin-length blonde hair already touched slightly with grey, her once-lean dancer’s body beginning to fill, to curve…

She
looked away from the mirror. This was a question she refused to ask, refused to hear in the silence of the room, in the whisper of the distant sea. She crossed the room, turned up the music, allowed the piano notes to fill the space, and point, and close, and point, and close,
en
seconde
, and close…

She
rose up on
pointe
, balanced, poised, her hand barely touching the barre.

The tide was going out, and the daylight was fading into evening. Chad walked back towards the town.

Above
him, the canopy of sky, pricked with the first faint stars. He felt the book in his pocket. He wondered how that odd woman in the tiny cottage had come to possess it. He wondered why she was so keen to part with it. Pages of handwritten natural philosophy, quoting Newton. Some kind of debate or disagreement, from what Tobias had said, about the nature of matter and the existence of the vacuum. Written by a man called Johann van Mielen.

To
one side, the sea, as dark as the evening. At his feet, the pebbles, worn smooth by the waves’ to-and-fro, over years, over centuries.

And
all this exists, he thought. All this is here, when it could so easily not be. Determined by chance? Or by God, the God that doesn’t answer when you call, as Tobias so rightly pointed out. The fact that matter comes into being, and goes out of being, and yet, quite randomly, there is all this, the waves of the sea, the stones at my feet, the breeze against my face…

It
was odd, he thought, that Virginia’s husband, a physicist himself, should have treasured this book. Or perhaps it wasn’t odd at all – perhaps questions of gravity, of atoms, of nothingness, are the same whether they’re from the nineteenth century or from the twenty-first.

In
his mind he saw her, again, standing on her doorstep, raw with loss. How could I help her? What is there to say about the death of a child? A real, living child. All I know is the loss of the chance of a child. We have no howls of pain, Helen and I. Only the silence, filling the gaps between us.

“…It
is very unlikely, Mr and Mrs Meyrick, I would say, impossible, that you could ever conceive again…” The consultant’s words, again. “There are, of course, all sorts of treatment paths we could pursue… I leave it to you both to discuss it… my door is always open…”

IVF.
DI. ICSI…

‘But
I’m only thirty-five,’ is all Helen would say, then thirty-six, thirty-seven… And somehow, the subject was closed.

The
lights of the town shone damp and yellow. He took the path away from the beach. The seafront was loud with cars and strolling boys, clusters of girls smoking and laughing by the derelict pier, its broken lines black against the charcoal sky.

Helen poured herself a glass of red wine and sat down at the kitchen table. It seemed to be night outside, and she wondered when her husband would be back. She got up and crossed the room, hearing the echo of her steps in the empty house.

The
vicarage, she thought, not for the first time. I live in a vicarage. ‘A vicar’s wife?’ her friends had shrieked, when she’d told them she was engaged to Chadwick. ‘Helen, a vicar’s wife? Who’d have thought?’

Oh,
the merriment. She wandered into the lounge. The two sofas brooded in the darkened room, like slumbering giants. She switched on the lights, put down her glass. She looked at the pale gold walls, she’d chosen the paint herself, stripped out the heavy green-striped wallpaper which was there before. She looked at their Patrick Caulfield print, which seemed brighter and bolder than it ever had in their rather dingy Hackney sitting room. There was a bureau in the corner, one of their few bits of decent furniture, Georgian, handed down from an aunt.

I
give it two years, her friend Anton had said. ‘You’re a dancer, babe. Dancer into vicar’s wife, it just ain’t going to go.’