Shadow Play (2 page)

‘I'm down at the front door, Rose. Fancy a drink?'

‘Oh yeah? And a hamburger? I'm hungry.'

‘Are you now? Fancy that. So am I, as it happens.' There was a suggestive chuckle.

‘Be there in a minute.'

She knew exactly how the rest of the evening would go. A couple of drinks, payment in kind for the company and a lift home and she didn't care. The main thing was always to leave the building with a man. Any man.

Passing through the office, hauling on her coat, teasing up her hair, pausing by a desk to straighten her tights, Rose thought again. Why the fuck should I? Why? Her tights were thick, to go with the weather and they had bagged at the knee. Distracted, she pulled up her short skirt and adjusted them thoroughly, beginning at the ankles and finally hauling them into place above her waist. Tucking in the crumpled blouse, she slung her bag over her shoulder, patted herself down and looked up at the door. Dinsdale Cotton, barrister-at-law, stood there, looking and laughing. Rose was furious.

‘Seen enough, have you? Want your eyes back, do you?'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘So dreadfully sorry. Didn't mean to be a voyeur … I really am sorry.'

‘Thought you'd gone home.'

‘I did. I left half my stuff, had to come back. Look, no offence. Can I buy you a drink? No, not for the view, but because I embarrassed you. And to stop me feeling such an idiot. I really didn't expect to find someone dressing, I'm so sorry.'

He stopped where he was, patently sincere, all his amusement dismissed by the look of fury on her face. Poor idiot, she thought, but not bad. No wonder he fancied Helen West and she him. Apart from his silly name and his wonderful floppy gold hair and the fact he was out of place in anything but a stately home, he was nice, inquisitive but nice, and the best looking man in the office, not that that was saying much. Rose relented.

‘No problem,' she muttered. ‘Don't worry about the drink though. Another time.'

He bowed, he fucking bowed, he really did. Rose would tell that to Paul later, by way of distraction, as if distraction would work. To Rose's own surprise, she found herself bowing back, both of them acting up, being silly. Dinsdale had this effect.

‘Mind your tights,' he grinned. She smiled too this time, right from the eyes. If he hadn't smiled and apologized, she'd have bitten his balls.

They'd had a case like that in the office last week, a woman who bit off a bloke's testicle during a row. Rose had been the only one who wasn't surprised.

S
he stamped down the corridor, shoved two finished files in the old goods lift for carriage to the basement, adjusted her bag again. There were fifteen ways to the front door. Turn right and you came to the end of a wide corridor, so wide it could take a bus. Then you turned left down narrow stairs, but fifty feet away there were broader stairs which threw themselves against a narrow and futile door, blocked in to lead only to the floor beneath instead of towards the continuance of the sweep which had once been grand. The same, wide stairs continued to the front door, two floors down, with similar interruptions. So did the back entrance and the clattering stairs she trod to the floor beneath through swing doors which creaked. Down, down, down, in a clatter of deliberate noise, because she liked making a noise, enjoying the emptiness without ever being afraid, it was so big you could hide yourself. The room numbers made no sense. It had been a hospital once, a Victorian lunatic asylum. Helen West had told Rose that, in the interests of her education: Miss West was stuffed full of useless information. The conversion to an office had been minimal, hence the wide corridors and the super-wide doors, built for trolleys and straitjackets with escorts. She had listened to Helen's lecture, wide eyed, blinking, waiting her turn, which came finally. ‘Naa, I don't believe you. This was never converted … It's just what it always was, still a loony-bin otherwise, isn't it?' Rose trod past the video room for obscene publications, past the library, all law reports incomplete, full of last week's newspapers, past the offices for fraud, tripped on the bulging carpet outside the passenger lift marked ‘Out of Order'. Helen West had also said they should all travel up and down in the goods lift, it was more reliable, very funny, and could carry at least one pygmy at a time. Rose supposed this building was all they could afford. More fool the lunatics who worked here.

Suddenly she was unsure she could cope with the evening ahead, and then on the second turn of stairs, she knew she would. Reckless Rose: that was her reputation. Nineteen-year-old Rose, never leaving the office without a man.

D
etective Sergeant Ryan and Detective Superintendent Bailey sat in the casualty department of Hackney hospital.

‘Fucking lunatic asylum, this,' said Ryan. ‘Run by a load of lunatic medics, far as I can see.'

‘Don't speak ill of the doctors. We need them.'

‘I wasn't speaking ill. Only as I find.'

‘Will you watch your mouth then? How much longer, do you think?'

‘Oh, ten minutes. Then they'll see you right in five and you can go home.'

Bailey looked at his damaged watch and groaned. His left eye was half closed by a huge purple swelling. A haematoma, the report would call it. To Ryan it was just another black eye, an occupational hazard not usually incurred by officers of Bailey's rank. Ryan was alarmed by the groan, the first yet. The rest had been a string of obscenities, not typical of Bailey either. Ryan wondered about sir's love life; he hadn't been too happy lately, but then he should have known better than to shack up with a solicitor.

‘What's the matter, sir? Does it hurt?'

‘Of course it doesn't bloody hurt,' said Bailey with heavy irony. ‘But I've just remembered I was supposed to get some food in. And cook it, round about now. Damn. She'll have to make do with soup.'

Ryan was incredulous. He thought of his own marriage, far from unsatisfactory, despite its vicissitudes, a history of burned meals left in ovens, but at least they'd been put in the oven in the first place.

‘Helen? Make do with soup. Why isn't she cooking the food? Doesn't she cook?' He might as well have said, does she wash?

Bailey turned the one good eye on Ryan. It looked a trifle sad, if not a little frightening, staring at him on its own like that.

‘We take it in turns. Her place, she cooks, mine, I do. Only we seem to have lost the knack. Not much taking of turns these days.'

It was as close to a confidence as he would get and Ryan saw the signal to change the conversation. Besides in the aftermath of Christmas and this raw January day, he did not want gloom on the brink of a holiday. He rubbed his hands together.

‘Never mind. Bramshill. Day after next. Get away from all this. Don't we deserve it? Can't be bad.'

They were both going on extended courses at the police training college. Ryan said his was for reading and writing; Bailey's was for senior command. They'd get him talking to hostages next.

‘Not bad today, either, was it?' Ryan continued, still rubbing his hands in a way Bailey found irritating. ‘Last day's active duty, five arrests. You put a really good sprint on there, sir, you really did. Never knew you could run so fast.' He means pretty good for a man of my age, Bailey thought.

‘No, you didn't know I could run, and you didn't know that the man was waiting round the corner, with his fist out either, did you? Why didn't you tell me? I could have just run into a wall and got it over with.'

They both shook with laughter. Ryan eyed the nurse who came towards them. There'd be women at Bramshill, surely. Time to get the old man out of himself.

‘Listen,' he said to the nurse. ‘When you've done with Mr Bailey here, would you mind putting a patch on that eye to make it look worse? Only he's got a woman waiting at home. He'll need sympathy.'

 

W
aiting. Helen felt the emptiness of Bailey's flat as soon as she put the key in the door. Late again, always late, but she couldn't even criticise him for it because she had been so herself, often enough. For the grosser occasions of his lateness, she usually managed to pay him back by not turning up at all some other time. The games they played, so childish. The light on his answering machine winked at her. It might have contained a message of explanation since he was scrupulous about such courtesies, but, mindful of his privacy so that he would be mindful of hers, she did not stop to listen. They had a rule that although each possessed the key to the other's house, that was not quite the same thing as being entirely at home in it. Helen craved a sensation of righteous indignation and knew she did not deserve it. Geoffrey was a policeman: he did not have a timetable like other men. They had chosen to have a relationship that was both uncommitted and committed at the same time. It had been bound to bristle with difficulties and it was she who insisted on this awkward format. Living together had not worked particularly well either. Helen never quite knew whether Bailey's professed willingness to try again, or indeed to marry her, worked as a comforter to their impermanent arrangements, or an irritant. Perhaps they were just stale. Like the bread in his bread-bin. He would have forgotten food. There was rice, tinned shrimps, cartons of soup and more than sufficient wine to dull the day. Not a feast, perhaps. She could have gone out again from this warehouse top floor which was so much cooler than her own cluttered basement and found the late-night shop on the corner to improve on their provisions, but she didn't. Instead she waited for a quarter of an hour and then went home.

 

I
t was dark down the street where Logo lived and darker still in the alleyway between his house and Granny's. Neither owned their small houses, impossible on their incomes, even in a street like this where no-one in their right mind would want to buy a house. That's what Logo thought anyway. The estate agents may have disagreed as their signs festooned five dwellings over the road. Attempts had been made to gentrify Legard Street, but those who tried with the bravery and optimism of youth tended to move after a year or so. Artisans' dwellings, mostly privately owned now, a few left like his and Gran's with sitting tenants. The sitting tenants were old, an endangered and truculent species who did not band together, but jeered at the private owners with their new front doors. All were threatened by the proximity of the football ground. Every second week in season and plenty of other times besides, their street was blocked by cars, their gardens trodden by the thousands on foot who came to worship the team. As the team's fortunes prospered, so the fortunes of the street were endangered. Young Mrs Jones in number seventeen had left after her first baby because she could not stand the prospect of keeping a fixture list in the kitchen so she would know on which Saturday she would be able to get out to the hospital and produce the next. In comparison to the hazards of the football stadium, Logo's singing was a minor irritation.

He sang in a light tenor, his voice blending with the persistent rain, increasing the eeriness, but not diminishing the triumph of the sound.

‘Come let us join the Church above

The martyr's praise to sing,

The soldier true who gave today

His life blood for his king …'

Tan ter ah! he finished, lost for the words of the next verse. A door slammed. There was the sound of scurrying footsteps in the wet, another door slamming, someone putting out rubbish. Logo did not look round. It wasn't a convivial street. He dived into the alley, feeling for his door key. As if there was any need. All anyone in the world had to do was kick it and they could come in if they wanted, but somehow, they didn't.

‘Mother!' he yelled as he pushed the door. Beyond the broken fencing which flanked the alley as it grew into a mossy backyard, light poured from the glass door of the next-door kitchen. Logo stepped over and rapped on the glass. She might not have heard with the rain, but now she would and he wanted someone to talk at. Although she would resent it, just as she hated being addressed as his mother or gran when she was nothing of the kind, it usually took her less than three minutes to come across. Old Mrs Mellors was victim to her own desire for company. Logo was her lifeline. She was also the only one in the street who continued to like his singing long after the novelty had worn off.

‘I may as well be your bloody mother,' she grumbled, heaving herself through the battered door he had left ajar. ‘What do you want now?'

‘Nothing,' he said indignantly. ‘When did I ever want anything from you? But it's a wet night and I thought you might like a drink.'

She sighed. ‘Well, don't you know me well, but you could have saved me getting wet and brought it in to me. You're wet already. I was doing my knitting.'

‘Nobody calls me wet.' He adopted a boxer's stance and squared up to her, the aggression diminished by the smile on his face. Margaret sat down heavily.

‘I know,' she said. ‘Obviously, you got on all right today. No wonder you're celebrating. Oh I do wish they'd stop picking on you like that, all those police. It isn't fair. Not that prison would do you harm. You'd get fed, put on a bit of fat.' She chuckled.

‘Is that what you want for me, you ungrateful old cow? Is that what you want?' From one misshapen jacket pocket he took a half-bottle of whisky and from the other, a bottle of dry ginger. Posh. Margaret Mellors found the sight of the whisky brought saliva to her mouth. She looked down at her own legs stretched across the rotten lino floor in front of her with her stick running parallel. Margaret was waiting for a new hip, felt as if she had been waiting for ever. She was pretty mobile with the old one, but by this time of day, she ached.

‘No,' she admitted. ‘That's not what I want at all and well you know it. I just wish you'd behave. But you're good to me, Logo. I'd rather have you alive than dead. Are you going to be all night pouring this drink, then?'