Stranded (10 page)

Next morning, I was back outside Jazbo's house just before seven. Early risers, villains, in my experience. According to the electoral roll, Gladys and Albert Conway lived there. I suspected the information on the list was well out of date. With names like that, they might have been Jazbo's grandparents, but a more likely scenario was that he'd taken over the house after the Conways had died or suffered the fate worse than death of an old people's home. The man himself emerged about five past the hour. There was less traffic around, but I managed to stay in contact with him into the city centre, where he parked in a loading bay behind Deansgate and let himself into the back of the shop.

I took a chance and left my wheels on a single yellow while I walked round the front of the row of shops and counted back to where Jazbo had let himself in. JJ's Butty Bar. Another piece of the jigsaw clicked into place.

Through the window, I caught the occasional glimpse of Jazbo, white-coated, moving between tall fridges and countertops. Once or twice he emerged from the rear of the shop with trays of barm cakes neatly wrapped and labelled, depositing them in the chill cabinets round the shop. I figured he was good for a few hours yet and headed back to the office before the traffic wardens came out to play.

I was back just after two. I kept cruising round the block till someone finally left a meter clear that gave me a clear view of the exit from the alley behind the sandwich shop. Jazbo emerged in his hot hatch just after three, which was just as well because I was running out of change. I stayed close to him through the city centre, then let a bit of distance grow between us as he headed out past Salford Quays and into the industrial estate round Trafford Park. He pulled up outside a small unit with Gingerbread House painted in a rainbow of colours across the front wall. Jazbo disappeared inside.

About fifteen minutes later he emerged with a supermarket trolley filled to the top with computer-game boxes. I was baffled. I'd had my own theory about where the packaging was coming from, and it had just been blown out of the water. I hate being wrong. I'd rather unblock the toilet. I let Jazbo drive off, then I marched into Gingerbread House. Ten minutes later I had all the answers.

Fintan O'Donohoe looked impressed as I laid out my dossier before him. Jazbo's address, photograph, phone number, car registration and place of work would be more than enough to hand him over to the police, gift-wrapped. ‘So how's this guy getting hold of the gear?' he demanded.

‘First thing I wondered about was the shrink-wrapping. That made me think it was someone in your despatch unit. But you were adamant it couldn't be either your mum or your auntie. Then when I found out he worked in a sandwich shop, I realised he must be using their wrap-and-seal gear to cover his boxes in. Which left the question of where the boxes were coming from. You ruled out an inside job, so I thought he might simply be raiding your dustbins for discarded gear. But I was wrong. You ever heard of a charity called Gingerbread House?'

O'Donohoe frowned. ‘No. Should I have?'

‘Your mum has,' I told him. ‘And so, I suspect, has Jazbo's mum or girlfriend or sister. It's an educational charity run by nuns. They go round businesses and ask them for any surplus materials and they sell them off to schools and playgroups for next to nothing. They collect all sorts – material scraps, bits of bungee rope, offcuts of specialist paper, wallpaper catalogues, tinsel, sheets of plastic, scrap paper. Anything that could come in handy for schools projects or for costumes for plays, whatever.'

Fintan O'Donohoe groaned and put his hands over his face. ‘Don't tell me . . .'

‘They came round here a few months ago, and your mum explained that you don't manufacture here, so there's not much in the way of leftover stuff. But what there was were the boxes from games that had been sent back because they were faulty in some way. The disks were scrapped, and so were the boxes and manuals normally. But if the nuns could make any use of the boxes and their contents . . . Your mum or your Auntie Geraldine's been dropping stuff off once a fortnight ever since.'

He looked up at me, a ghost of an ironic smile on his lips. ‘And I was so sure it couldn't be anything to do with my mum!'

‘Don't they say charity begins at home?'

Homecoming

O
blivious to any echoes, filmic or literary, Miranda Bryant said that she would buy the flowers herself.

Peter had made the offer sincerely, willing to take on part of the burden of organising their first dinner party in their new city. But he was relieved to have avoided any disruption to a day he would spend with women who paid him large sums of money to change what they saw in the mirror. He knew he did his best work when there was nothing external to distract him.

Miranda knew that too. She liked the rewards his work had brought them and so she'd been content to set her own ambitions to one side. There was no room in their marriage for two highflying medical careers. Instead of the neurosurgery she'd once dreamed of performing, she'd specialised in dermatology. Plenty of opportunity for parttime work and no call-outs at night or weekends. Plenty of opportunity to make sure Peter's life ran smoothly.

She stood in her immaculate kitchen and began to organise her purchases. Finest Italian artichokes, chargrilled and marinated in olive oil speckled with fragments of herbs; dark red organic Aberdeen Angus steaks with porphyry marbling of fat; transparent slices of pancetta; broad sage leaves with their curious texture; plump scallops, their vivid corals curled like commas round the succulent white flesh. Beautiful, sensual, ready to fill an emptiness.

She reached for a small, sharp, strong knife and slit open a plastic bag, spilling oysters over the granite worktop. She picked one up, running her thumb over the layered shell. So ugly on the outside, so perfect on the inside, they reminded her of what Peter tried to do with his patients. The thought irritated her and she reached for the radio. ‘
An
d this afternoon on
Castaway,
our guest is an international bestsellin
g thriller writer. She's published twenty-three novels, translated into more tha
n thirty languages. She's won awards for her work on thre
e continents, and judging by the quotes on her book jackets
, she is the thriller writer's thriller writer. Jane Carson, welcom
e to Radio Dunedin.'

‘Thanks, Simon. It's a pleasure to be here.
'

The knife skidded across the uneven ridges of the shell, slicing deep into the base of Miranda's thumb. For a moment, shock immobilised her. The slit of blood swelled fat and spread, running down the ball of her thumb towards the thin white scar on her wrist. ‘Damn it to hell,' she said, turning on her heel and hurrying towards the cloakroom where the nearest first aid kit was stowed. She couldn't believe herself. Just as well she'd turned her back on surgery if she couldn't even shuck an oyster without bleeding all over the kitchen.

Miranda cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe then efficiently closed it with micropore tape. She walked back to the kitchen, rubbing the tape down firmly. ‘Turn off the radio,' she said out loud. But her hand remained poised, halfway to the switch.

‘. . . goe
s back twenty-five years to when I was an undergraduate at Girton.
'

‘And what's so special about this record, Jane?'

(a deep
, warm chuckle) ‘It reminds me of my first great lov
e affair.'

‘Was that when you realised you were gay?'

‘I'
d realised that quite a while before, Simon. But it was th
e first time I fell in love with a woman who loved m
e in return. This record reminds me of what that fel
t like. The intensity, the excitement, the sense of possibility. An
d of course the desperation and the desolation when it al
l went horribly wrong.'

‘You like to be reminded of ho
w it all went wrong?'

‘I'm a writer, Simon. Everything is material.
'

‘Well, I hate to think what you're going to make o
f me, Jane!'

‘Probably a corpse, Simon.'

(nervous laugh) ‘Now you're reall
y worrying me. But let's have your first record. It's Joa
n Armatrading's “Love and Affection”.'

The opening notes filled the kitchen, transporting Miranda back to her own youth. She tried to fight it, reminding herself of Noël Coward's sardonic dictum about the potency of cheap music. But memory was in command now, undeniable. She could feel the thin warmth of spring sunshine, the faint damp of the grass penetrating her clothes, the heat in her skin like fever. Dark against the eggshell blue of the sky, a profile leaning over her, lips parted, jawline taut. Then the sun blotted out by the first kiss. She'd thought she understood desire, but had immediately comprehended her mistake.

Nothing had prepared her for that moment, or for what followed. Everything that had gone before seemed small, quiet, colourless. Love had hit her with an amplification of the senses that left her feeling unpeeled. Where her lover rejoiced in the awakening, Miranda fretted over what it might mean.

They never articulated it to each other, but each was conscious that they didn't want to share whatever was happening between them with the rest of the world. It demanded discretion. They met behind the closed doors of their own rooms or else privately in public places. At prearranged times in libraries, apparently by chance on walks by the river, seemingly happenstance attendances at the same parties which they studiously left separately. Their private names for each other echoed their love of secrecy. Miranda was Orlando – Virginia Woolf had been iconic then – and her beloved, The Kid, for reasons more obvious to anyone twenty or thirty years their senior. Not only did this make them feel they had created each other afresh, it also meant that any curious friend picking up a card or note would be none the wiser.

Miranda loved it when they went to the cinema or the theatre. Not that she was particularly interested in film or drama; even then, she had had little interest in the fictive world, preferring the hard edges of science and philosophy. What she loved was the gradual descent into darkness, when The Kid's hand would creep across her thigh and enclose her fingers. Even more, she loved the opportunity secretly to study The Kid, too absorbed in whatever was unfolding to sense Miranda's scrutiny. Even now, as the dying strains of Armatrading's voice faded on the radio, Miranda could picture that intent profile, lips slightly parted as if ready for the next kiss. Watching The Kid in the variable dark, now there was joy.

‘It's a time machine, music lik
e that.'

‘You're so right, Jane. It recreates the memories an
y castaways would want to take with them to a desert island
. Now, after Cambridge, you went to America to do a postgraduat
e degree in creative writing, didn't you? Why America?'

‘Back then
, there weren't many creative writing courses here in the UK
. And I also wanted to put as much distance between m
e and Cambridge as I could.'

Miranda too suddenly wanted some distance. She hurried across the kitchen to the French doors that led to her courtyard garden. Fresh herbs, that's what she needed. The sharp darkness of rosemary, the bright fragrance of basil, the creeping insistence of thyme. The herbs of her married life.

For almost twenty years, Miranda and Peter had basked in sunshine in Cape Town, their lives gilded with security and success. But latterly, they had both felt drawn back to the cooler climate of their youth. Living in exile was all very well, but the soul eventually craved more familiar tastes and smells. Miranda knew she pined for something, and thought it was home. Edinburgh had seemed like the answer.

Their first two months had kept her too busy to test the hypothesis. Moving into a new home, buying furniture and art, discovering the best restaurants, trying to assimilate twenty years of missed cultural life, negotiating a life without servants; it had challenged Miranda and invigorated her. But there had been no space for reflection.

And now it was upon her, memory's insistence could not be eluded so easily. There was, there could have been, nothing predictable or assumed about the pattern of their love. It was up to them to make it up as they went along, and The Kid was never short of invention. The Kid loved to play games. One week, they'd decided to eat nothing but white food. The challenge had been to make it exciting. They'd started with the obvious; white bread, cottage cheese, natural yoghurt. Miranda had thought she'd done well with vanilla ice cream till The Kid pointed out that college kitchens had no freezers and they'd have to eat it all at one sitting. And then, with a huge grin, had proposed how they might make that more interesting . . . Miranda blushed at the memory, her skin tingling. The Kid had also won the contest, with a meal that had seemed impossibly exotic in 1978 – prawn crackers, white asparagus and a Boursin. So much more exoticism than Miranda's tightly conformist background could ever have accommodated. No wonder her mother had hated The Kid on first sight.

Miranda snipped the herbs, lifting them to her face and inhaling deeply. She wanted to banish the distant past, replace it with more recent memories, recollections that would anchor her to the life she had now rather than the life she might have lived. She deliberately turned her thoughts to her dinner party and their guests. An advocate and her banker husband. A medical insurance executive and his girlfriend who did something with a charity for disabled children. One of Peter's colleagues and his wife. Who was, it appeared, nothing more than that. Unbidden and unwanted, Miranda thought how The Kid would have jeered at such a lineup. ‘Cheap,' she muttered, walking back into the kitchen.

‘So what made you turn to th
e crime thriller instead of the literary novel you'd studied i
n America?'

(a dark chuckle) ‘The desire for revenge, Simon. Ther
e were people I wanted to murder but I knew I'd never ge
t away with it. So I decided to kill them on th
e page instead.'

‘That's pretty scary, Jane. Why on earth di
d you want to murder them?'

‘Because I blamed them for breakin
g my heart.'

‘You wanted to murder your girlfriend?'

‘No. I wante
d to murder the people who broke us up and nearl
y destroyed her in the process. But in a way, that's irrelevant
. What motivates writers is almost always irrelevant. It's what w
e do with it in the crucible of imagination that matters
. We transform our pain and our frustration into something unrecognisable.
'

‘So if these people you wanted to murder were t
o read your books, they wouldn't recognise themselves?'

‘Not only woul
d they not recognise themselves, Simon, they wouldn't recognise the situation
. What appears on the page seldom has any visible connectio
n to the event that triggered the writer's response.'

‘That's amazing
, Jane. Now, your next record is Bach's sixth Brandenburg Concerto
. Can you tell us why you've chosen it?'

‘Two reasons
, really. I first discovered Bach when I was at Cambridge, so lik
e the Joan Armatrading, it also takes me back in time
. But perhaps more importantly, it's a canon. It revolves around itself
, it reinvents itself. It's complex, and it's perfectly structured. I
n its beginning is its end. And that's exactly how th
e plot of a thriller should be. You could say that b
y introducing me to Bach, my first girlfriend also taught m
e how to plot. It's a lesson . . .'

This time, Miranda's hand reached the switch and clicked the radio off in mid-sentence. While the beef was marinading, she could buy the flowers. She walked up the hill, wondering yet again how Queen Street Gardens stayed green under the blanket of traffic fumes that choked the city centre. It was a relief to enter the fragrance of the florist's. She drank in the heady scents and the underlying aroma of humus as she checked out the array of blooms. Among the mundane domestic chrysanths and carnations were flowers that were exotic for Scotland but which provoked a sharp stab of nostalgia in Miranda. So many mornings she'd sat on her verandah looking out at those very flowers growing in her own African garden. Things had been easier there; there had been nothing to provoke such ambushes of memory as she'd endured that afternoon.

She made a mental list of what she wanted then wove her way past the aluminium buckets to the counter at the back of the shop. As she approached, the low background mutter resolved itself into Radio Dunedin and Miranda faltered.

‘Jane, it'
s been a pleasure having you here this afternoon.'

‘Even if I d
o turn you into a corpse?'

‘I suppose that's better than bein
g ignored. My guest this afternoon has been thriller writer Jan
e Carson, who's appearing tonight at the Assembly Rooms here i
n Edinburgh at seven o'clock. She'll be reading from her lates
t novel,
The Last Siberian Tiger,
and I can promise you a rea
l thrill.'

The florist gave Miranda an inquiring look. ‘Can I help you?'