Shadow Play (10 page)

More weeping in the kitchen, and the yelling of, Why, why, why? from Logo over weeks, while Margaret had listened, not said much while she kept looking at her own stairs and wondering if this were the night her husband might die. After some days, Logo reported his wife and child missing. The police came and searched their house; enquiries were instituted, but she never wrote, that silly bitch of a wife, and Margaret never said how she had seen them going down the back alley in the middle of the afternoon with the fibre suitcase which did not expand properly, because it was so etched in her memory she could not have given it words, and because she had been trusted and that meant she was bound by a promise.

‘Why?' she muttered to herself. ‘Why? How could they just go?'

You never know your neighbour. So her man had died, she had lost her substitute child and grandchild, and Logo had gone about howling, searching the hills and dales of North London, convinced he would find, if not the wife, the darling daughter. Poor, poor soul, with the police picking on him ever since. Her heart had gone out to him, she respected his privacy, believed and pitied him, never intruded, same as always. If it hadn't been for Sylvie, she might never have gone upstairs in his house, not unless he had fallen ill and he never did that.

But this evening, following Blondie, tut-tutting and still playing games up Logo's stairs, feeling cross with the naughty child, she had stopped in her tracks on the top landing. Facing her from the corner of his bedroom, spartan, bare of the superfluous, not a frill or a flounce like the rest of this house, was that fibre suitcase. As it had been, still crooked. The suitcase of a wife who had left with it and who, according to him and everyone else, had never come back.

Margaret separated Mrs Logo's letter from the rest and put it in the drawer where she kept knives.

 

H
elen West was rummaging in the kitchen. From time to time she eyed the telephone, not quite wishing it to ring, but somehow resenting its silence. She had willed the fridge to yield exciting secrets but after her own time-honoured fashion there was nothing inside but a jar of pickle, one of dead mayonnaise, butter, rock solid, a lettuce which was brown to the point of liquefaction and six suspect eggs. I have no rules, she said to herself, no rules at all. I feed like a soldier on the retreat in some frozen waste and I have grown as thin. I like being a renegade: I forage in shops rather than buy. Is this the life for me? It took ten days without Geoffrey (two phone calls, one too many), for all the old regimes to be reestablished. Through the very thin veneer of her domestication, acquired only through contact with men, the way they were supposed to acquire similar habits from women, she was emerging as an alley cat.

Though truth to tell, the scrappy eating and total lack of cooking which had featured in the last ten days, during which time she had passed the supermarket with two fingers raised and no potatoes to rub her shins as they strained at polythene bags, owed only as much to retrograde eating behaviour as it did to a strange feeling of nausea. The eggs eaten late were committed to the sewerage system so quickly it was as if they only lived in her digestion on borrowed time. They were unable to pay rent, these eggs, like most other foods except crisps, sharp, artificial, savoury tastes, or items of sickening sweetness. And she was thinner, definitely thinner: the waistband of her skirt that morning had hung loose: halfway through a court case, she had risen to shout some reply and found the skirt had swivelled round, back to front, crumpled and out of shape. That small incident vexed her.

She stood in her kitchen, admired for its warmth and flair like all her other rooms, the product of a hundred junk shops encouraged into interesting life and a little out of control. ‘I love this old dresser,' Geoffrey had said. ‘I love your old, cracked, unhealthy enamel sink, your mugs from the wedding of Charles and Di, and I love the ancient carving knives which came from car-boot sales, but, my dear, they do not cut.'

She was hungry and sick, sick and hungry. Three, four drinks with Dinsdale and the mastication of nibbles with all the nutriment of air, and she ran for the bathroom with its old and beautiful tiles, pictures on the walls even in there, only to be sick. What is this? she thought, raising from the basin to the mirror a face which was horribly pale. What the hell is this?

Helen West, arrogantly accustomed to health, an avoider of doctors when possible, rummaged in the cupboard beneath the mirror for something to settle this intestinal riot. Bisodol, Rennies, Nurofen, aspirin, every hangover cure under her sun. A pregnancy kit about a thousand years old which her hand nudged and knocked to one side in search of something efficacious enough to allow eating without retribution later, but the fingers stopped of their own accord and dragged out the unopened box as she squatted back on her haunches, rocking with the shock of her own conclusions. When was the last time she'd had the curse? And when last had she and Bailey celebrated the one thing they always seemed to get a hundred per cent right? His house, her house, something usually missing. You weren't fertility plus at thirty-five, but age was irrelevant to an egg.

Helen got her coat and made for the street. Dammit: she craved the produce of the Chinese takeaway; she would have it in any event, and she could not stay here with her own thoughts.

 

O
utside, the night was peculiarly still and stiff with an icy cold which formed her breath into puffs of vapour, so cold, she immediately wanted to turn back inside, but driven by her own hunger, she did not. The frost which had formed in the darkness of dawn and melted in the afternoon, now drew exquisite patterns on car windscreens like some exotic artist. From the great distance of a mile or more, she heard in the stillness the great roar of an enormous crowd. There was no sound the same: the sound of the mountain moving to Jehovah. Helen stopped, chilled to the marrow by that distant roar of the jungle lion waiting to get out. Then the cars started again: the lights of the main road hit her eyes. The sickness had passed.

Oh Lord, do not let me be afraid of the dark.

 

R
edwood was often asked to give lectures – to new recruits, to clubs, to Justices of the Peace. They were good for his profile, so he did them when he could not farm them out.

‘The mandate of the Crown Prosecution Service,' he was fond of beginning in a good, loud voice, ‘is to prosecute without fear or favour, according to the evidence, those who break the criminal law. Evidence is supplied to us by the police. It is we who decide what to do with it.'

He made the process sound civilised and eminently streamlined. What he did not say was that his own office was drowning in paper. They were more vulnerable to paper than they were to heart attacks. The paper would kill them first.

‘Our office is computerised, of course,' he would say, remembering not to cringe. So it was, in a manner of speaking. The computer received information and dictated the next move for every case: they all had pathetic faith in it without any understanding, but it did not obviate the necessity for portable paper to go to and from courtrooms and barristers' chambers, fraying in a dozen sets of hands, often without a duplicate, until finally it was filed in the vast areas of the basement where Redwood never trod.

‘Because of the confidential, incriminating nature of the material we keep, we do, of course, take great care with security …'

Even he had to wince at that. By security, Redwood meant the high railings with their lethal spikes, the assiduous sccurity men they had by day and the lazy character they had between seven in the evening and the same hour next morning, and also at the weekends. He came from an agency, it was cheaper. Redwood hated the building so much, he couldn't imagine anyone wanting to get in. Only a fearless child could climb the railings. It didn't occur to him there was any need for better security.

 

‘R
ose, any chance I can have tomorrow's paperwork by one'clock? Like I asked earlier? Only I'd rather not come back this afternoon.'

Rose raised a harassed face from the files she was marshalling into piles, in date order, each like a rocky monument on the floor round her desk.

‘I dunno. Doubt it,' she said rudely. Helen felt her temper rise. The link between her worries and her sense of humour was proving tenuous, the thread of it not only thin but frayed. She made a last effort.

‘Please can you find me tomorrow's files? Surely it isn't too much to ask?'

Rose was embracing a bundle of six to her bosom, and she dropped them abruptly, turning as she did so. She was shaking with tension, but it looked like a gesture of petty defiance.

‘Rose,' said Helen with warning in her voice, ‘I really do have to go at one, and I might not be able to get back. Can you sort tomorrow's stuff for me now? Please?'

Rose turned to face her, livid with anger. The spikes of her hair, subdued of late, seemed to rise round her head like the defensive spine of a hedgehog.

‘And supposing other people have to leave early too? Supposing there's no-one else to do their fucking work and the computer's screwed and silly cows like you are asking for the moon? You can fuck off. Your bloody files are in here somewhere. Either find them your bloody self or come back later.' She kicked one of the heaps with a booted foot and the files lurched sideways, but Rose had not finished. There was an impulse to malice she could not resist.

‘And while I'm at it, don't you come this holier-than-thou bit with me ever again. You and Mr Cotton, both with an afternoon off each? Good, isn't it? What's it to be then, your place or his?'

Helen wanted to slap her: Rose was waiting to be slapped, but something in the insinuation raised an inhibiting twinge of guilt. The files toppled in slow motion as Rose strode from the room. The other clerks watched from their tables and desks in a deathly silence. Helen breathed in and out slowly. She stared at the window where she had seen Rose's reflection two weeks before and saw only her own, paler and older face. With the others as an audience, she knelt on the floor and began to go through the papers, looking for those which bore her name, seething but still using her eyes. For the moment she hated Rose to the same degree the girl seemed to despise her in return. Perhaps that was why none of the clerks helped her, but let her grub around on the floor, humiliated. If they'd offered, she would have refused.

Redwood came into the room, as uncertainly as he always did for fear the clerks might bite him or reveal his failure to remember most of their names.

‘Who was shouting in here? I won't have it … Oh! Helen, what are you doing?' She looked up from the floor with a fiendish grin.

‘Looking for a contact lens, sir.' Sir was inconsistent in his observations, but there were some details he never forgot.

‘I didn't think you wore lenses.'

‘I do now. Was there anything in particular you wanted?'

‘That shouting …'

‘It was me.' He beckoned her out of the room with evident disgust, poised for a reprimand. From beyond the door, Helen heard the buzz of voices no longer suppressed, cutting through her back like an icy wind.

 

I
n the lavatory, Rose Darvey sat and gulped. Trained as she was in several aspects of self-control, she had long since mastered the technique of crying while remaining silent. You held your nose, so that the effort of breathing through the mouth somehow suspended the rising of the noisier sobs. Putting her hands over her ears also encouraged the silence which had always seemed so imperative when she cried. She sat with the door locked, trying one method after the next, while large tears ran down her face and made a mess of the make-up so carefully applied in the spotlight over her bedroom mirror. She couldn't make shadows in here: it required a light without a shade. She had bitten her fingernails down to sore stumps, another reason for habitually playing with her hands. Granny had placed some bitter solution over them once to make her stop it: it had worked temporarily. Granny, Granny, help me now, please help me now, where are you? The vision of Granny somehow increased the size of the hairball in her chest: the effort to make no sound felt like a thistle lodged in her throat. Granny, she thought. Got to try and see Granny. Granny could help. See Granny and do something about this bloody baby, before I go mad. Can't tell Michael, just can't. He'll never love me.

‘Rose?' A timid voice. ‘Rose. You all right Rose?' A plaintive whine from one of the others sent to enquire. Rose was her colleagues' heroine; she made them laugh, she knew more than any of them and was afraid of no-one. ‘Rose, come out of there, will you? Only we're worried about you. Come out, please.'

The plea in the voice made her freeze for a moment. Come on out, darling, and no harm will ever befall you again. Rose dropped her handbag on the floor, rummaged inside for her make-up bag, the old protector. She made a loud noise with the toilet roll, tearing it, blowing her nose with unnecessary violence, scrubbing at the ruin of the mascara. The same voice again, though not so wheedling, assumed less reminiscent proportions. It might be all right if she just carried on without too many cracks in her armour.

‘Rose, are you all right? Talk to me, what's the matter?'

How she despised the tragedies of the ladies' lavatory; why did she come here when she could have hidden in the nice, warm womb of the basement? She gave an exaggerated sigh.

‘Of course I'm bloody all right. Just get me a vet. I need putting down.'

The voice beyond the door giggled in relief. Same old Rose, their leader. And which one of you, Rose thought, as she ran her fingers through her hair to encourage the spikes she had been subduing because Michael did not care for them much although he never said so, which one of you is fiddling the computer then and stealing the files? Which one?