Holloway Falls (5 page)

6

I

Holloway dreamed he was a tattered crow at the window of Andrew Winston Taylor’s house.

He flapped his blue-black wings and became a tendril of ectoplasm that rippled through tiny cracks in damp limestone.

He was a flickering, a dry rustle in the corners of that gloomy building. He was the tick of capillary on optic nerve. He was a discarnate longing that lurked over that deserted and fatherless family, a sentinel to watch over them until the sorrow slipped away and he woke to discover he had been weeping.

That day, Joanne Grayling disappeared.

II

Holloway was the son of Charles and Elizabeth. Charles spent his life in the British army. Elizabeth Fowler, a Halifax tobacconist’s daughter, was a Catholic twenty years his junior. Their first child, Sarah, was born with a hole in her heart and did not live. William was conceived unexpectedly several years later. His first sense memories were of military bases in hot territories.

His mother died when he was four, of anaphylactic shock brought on by a wasp sting. His maternal great-aunt acceded to his guardianship. William was shipped off to live with her in Halifax. Perhaps because Grace was old before William was of school age, they formed a strange and tender friendship of abandoned equals.

He never saw his father again.

When he was seventeen, Will joined the Royal Engineers, which took him away from England. He was tattooed in Berlin and Singapore. He left the army at twenty-one to live in Leeds, part of an England whose name he had tattooed above his heart but hardly knew.

Now that tattoo had bled out to an indistinct, blue scroll. A new century was beginning and he lived alone in another city: Bristol, built on the traffic of slaves. His new life seemed in every way disconnected from what had gone before. This was another England, a place where he flicked through discoloured snapshots, his heart hollow for their fading. His mental depth of field had shifted. Leeds, that boy, that decade seemed to have telescoped into history.

Although the present generation’s taste for kitsch and nostalgia sought to deny it, there had been little of worth in that half-lit, cheerless decade. There lurked at its axis a recondite absence. For every pair of loon flares, for every Stylophone, for every platform boot, for every Bay City Roller, for every
Saturday Night Fever
or
Dancing Queen
, he remembered a Bobby Sands, an emasculated government, a three-day week: power strikes, postal strikes. He remembered refuse rotting in streets and cadavers left unburied. He remembered National Front marches in English cities and Armalites and petrol bombs in Belfast. And at the decade’s dreary fag end, he remembered that hectoring voice; the vulture beak and cartoon stalk from a child’s nightmare. Margaret Hilda. In his mind she was married forever with Peter, her fervent Other: dark Peter, a shadow invoked by druidic energy, by the tidal surge of past against future. On street corners, under lampposts, in Bradford, in Leeds transported Dianic priestesses were unzipped, spilling out the future again and again for those who had eyes to see.

The bleak occult seeped into the moors: crooning its song to quiet, mad Peter, in his donkey jacket, his jeans and his clay-clegged boots. His breath steaming, horselike, in cloudless cold. Grave-digging spade in one raw, red hand. Arcane and horrible knowledge coiling and spitting behind his blank eyes. Blooding the decade, the century to come, with a ball-headed hammer raised like a dagger above him.

The Ripper lurked deep in the shadows cast by Holloway’s memory: The Ripper was present in his photographs. He was the pyramid of black cast across concrete by an oblique sun hammering on red brick tenements, outside which he and half-forgotten friends stood, smiling, squinting, their eyes lost in shadow. Their pasty skin, the low Yorkshire skies at the end of England. It was an England in which he was twenty-one, and in which he met Kate, who would be his wife.

After leaving the army, he found a job training to repair lifts. He took a room in the Harold’s, a Headingley estate of back-to-back tenements. Laundry dried on lines strung across narrow streets.

Late November 1978. Beans on toast on his lap, watching
The Two Ronnies
with Ted and Dot, the couple with whom he lodged. Ted was off on the sick: emphysema. He wore Brylcreem and a grey cardigan with brown leather buttons. Dot’s hair was dyed black and lacquered into a beehive. As far as Will could tell, she was almost perfectly spherical. Will’s own crew cut had yet to grow out and, too short to style, it sprouted ragged and uneven at his nape and round the ears.

After tea, he stepped outside into the cold wind, turned up the fleecy collar and set off like Shackleton, hands buried in pockets, to meet his mates in the Faversham.

He stepped through the door into a burst of pub noise, blue smoke and moist body heat. The Faversham was crowded with university and polytechnic students. Greasy hair, National Health spectacles, military greatcoats. Hippies in tatty crushed velvet and greasy denim. Punks. It didn’t take much to qualify as a punk in 1978; short hair and drainpipes were enough to do it. But there was a preponderance of black, too. The occasional safety pin, a mohair sweater or two. One or two daring mohicans.

Tony was there, and Ian, and whoever else. (His memory was full of half-remembered Tonys and Ians.) They’d be moving to town later, where they would sit round the edge of a discothèque dance floor, supping pints and watching girls.

He’d been there perhaps half an hour when Kate arrived. She was in a group that gathered noisily at the bar, counting out change in their palms and yelling and laughing and pushing. Her hair was short and shone blue-black (she would cringe now, to think of it). She wore a black mohair sweater that slipped alternately from each shoulder.

Looking at her made Will hurt. He told the story often, in later, happier years: at Christmas and birthdays and on holidays.
Honest to God. It was like being punched.

He snatched glimpses of her during breaks in the conversation. He followed her progress to the lavatory.

He resolved to follow her to the bar and stood, too abruptly, shaking the table. Not unkindly, he was told: fucking watch it, that was a full pint. And he was called a twat. But he didn’t hear. He clapped his hands and said: ‘Right.’

The bar was four deep and he had Bambi legs. It took some time to push in alongside her.

He said: ‘Can I get this one for you?’

She turned and considered him through narrowed eyes. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said: “I’ll buy the next one.”’

‘No thank you.’

She turned away. He didn’t move.

She clicked her tongue against her pallet, turned again. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes.’

(
Chemistry
, she would say, later.
Pure pheromones. Two dogs in the street.
)

‘With?’

‘Your name.’

She laughed. Her eyes crinkled. She told him.

‘And your phone number.’

‘I have a boyfriend.’

‘One day you might not.’

‘Well. If that day comes, you’ll have to ask me again.’

‘If that day comes I might.’

‘Don’t hold your breath.’

‘I won’t. What are you studying?’

‘Law.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘Why?’

‘So we’ll have something to talk about.’

He excused himself, bid her goodnight and walked away. It was the bravest thing he had ever done.

It was necessary to force his friends (swearing quietly through gritted teeth:
Lads, just fuck off out of it. Please. Fucking hell
.) through the pub doors. He exited only after shoving the last of them into the cold night. They went to a disco and, unlikely as he knew it to be, he kept an eye on the door all night, in case she walked in.

He suggested with great frequency that they drink in student pubs. His mates didn’t mind. They professed to hate students, but didn’t tire of student parties where they might be offered a joint by some undergraduate terrified of their petulant class antagonism.

Will was able to bump into Kate twice, sometimes three times a week. She wasn’t lying about the boyfriend. His name was Sam. He looked like Bryan Ferry’s rebellious younger brother and had what Will imagined to be the bearing of a radical poet.

Will found some classmates of Kate who, in exchange for a couple of pints of Tetley with a whiskey chaser, were happy to acquaint him with her timetable. They outlined campus geography for him and he waited for her after class one crisp morning in February. She saw him there, paused long enough to disengage from her companions, then hugged books to her breast and walked on.

He jogged a step or two in her wake, stopped. Called out to her.

She stopped, without turning.

He said: ‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘Are you still going out with him?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘
Still
?’

‘Still.’

‘Shame.’

Now she turned.

‘Why a
shame
?’

‘You’re too good for him.’

She laughed.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What I said. You’re too good for him.’

‘But you’d like me to go out with you instead?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I’m not too good for you?’

He thrust his shaking hands in the tight denim pockets and set his weight on one leg.

‘Oh, you’re too good for
me
,’
he said. ‘You’re
far
too good for me. That’s the point. Why would I go to all this effort if you weren’t too good for me?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Very smooth.’

‘I’m not being smooth. Look at me. Do I look smooth?’

He took his hands from his pockets.

‘See. I’m shaking.’

‘It’s cold.’

‘Not that cold. And my mouth is dry.’

‘You’re probably hungover.’

‘That too.’

She put her head to one side and regarded him from an oblique angle. By spring they were together.

Kate fell pregnant early the next year, 1980. They argued and separated. Several weeks later, Will turned up at her door bearing daffodils. He asked her to dinner. She refused.

In the hallway, the front door open to the weather, he pleaded with her to keep the child.

He told her he’d applied to join the police force: it was a steady job and it would compliment Kate’s chosen career to the best of his limited ability. That morning he had been accepted as a trainee.

She held him. She stroked his hair, whispered in his ear that he was a strange one, a strange one.

Kate was heavily pregnant when they married at Leeds Register Office. With the exception of Kate’s Auntie Linda, her family didn’t attend. Will asked an old army friend called Geordie to be his best man. His aunt Grace lent him money for the rings and a honeymoon weekend in the Lake District. All together, nine people came.

They held an informal reception in a room above the Cricketer’s Arms in Headingley. Will’s speech was courteous and heartfelt. Kate wished her parents were there to hear it. When the speech was over, Auntie Linda hugged Will to her chest and told him Kate was a lucky girl. Then she offered a toast to the future, in which all present at that moment ardently believed.

Caroline was born late in September. During the birth, Will held Kate’s hand and stroked her sweat-sodden hair, struck dumb with mortal terror at the enormity of what was happening in that shabby cubicle. Later, he cradled the unwashed child, still slick with blood and mucus.

He knew that his love was more powerful, more ferocious, than God.

III

On the day that Joanne was taken, he returned late to his Bedminster flat: rented, one-bedroom, second-floor.

He showered, wrapped himself in a bathrobe and made a mug of tea before booting up his computer, an iMac that he and Caroline had chosen together and bought from John Lewis. The iMac sat before the sitting room window on an Ikea dining table.

Holloway and his daughter exchanged emails twice daily. It was Caroline’s way of maintaining a presence in his life. She sent jokes, apocrypha, urban myths and JPEGs that had made her laugh: dancing babies, singing penises. She wrote about books she was reading and places she had been and things she wanted to do. He pecked out lower-case replies with an index finger.

He set the mug on the pine table, pushed aside a sheaf of bills awaiting payment and clicked on the Mail icon.

Caroline hadn’t written yet but logged in his inbox were two messages from an unfamiliar address: [email protected].

He took a sip of tea and double clicked on the first of the messages. It contained just a brief video clip. There was no text.

The clip was perhaps twenty seconds long. He played it twice. Although the sight and intonation of his wife’s passion was familiar to him, and precious and fearful, he had not heard or seen it for a long time.

The film was shot from a high angle: perhaps through an upper bedroom window. Kate laughed throatily and called out to God. She brushed the sweaty hair from her brow. The young man she was fucking reached up a lazy hand and squeezed her breast. She slapped the hand away. He muttered a glottal response. She ground her hips. The young man scowled as if in pain, clutched her thighs.

Holloway sat without moving until the tea went cold. Then he opened the second file. It contained a JPEG attachment, a single photograph. No text.

A naked woman lay bound on a dirty timber floor.

Because she was blindfold and not wearing the dark wig he paid her to wear, it took Holloway some time to recognize Joanne Grayling. Her real hair was blonde and cropped boyishly short. Something had been written on her body: one word. The lettering ran from her pubic bush to her breasts but her position made the word hard to decipher. Holloway saw an A and a T, distorted by the soft fold of her belly.

He closed the file. Opened it again.

He cupped his mouth.

The clip could only have been sent by the man who filmed it.

His name was Derek Bliss.

He was a private detective whose services Holloway had contracted following the breakdown of his marriage. His office was located on a Bradford backstreet, above a launderette whose own sign seemed faded by one wash too many. They met in a workman’s café next door, huddled in fixed plastic chairs over a Formica table.