Tree of Hands (15 page)

She needed time to think. Those four days she had would give her time to think how she would handle Jason's return. Someone was going to have to be alerted about the violence that was being meted out to Jason. She wouldn't be in a very strong position to press this home, but somehow she was going to have to, so that he was never sent back to that.

Against Carol Stratford she hardened her heart. Mopsa was her concern and she herself was her concern and Jason who had been a defenceless victim, but not Carol Stratford whose other two children had already been taken away from her legally and justly . . .

JASON HAD BEEN
missing for a week. Wednesday had come round again and he had been gone a whole week. Barry had to go back to work. It might have been different if Jason had been his own child or if he had been married to Carol. As it was, he had no real excuse for leaving Ken to carry on on his own. Jobs were hard to come by too. It wasn't that he thought Ken would replace him but rather that he might just decide he didn't need a partner at all.

He asked Carol to marry him. It wasn't the first time, more like the fourth or fifth. They weren't as close as they had been, he felt that, he felt as if she had slipped a little away from him since Jason went. For one thing, they hadn't made love. He didn't like to touch her, it seemed wrong unless she made it plain she wanted him. The doctor had given her sleeping pills and she was asleep sometimes before he got into bed. Often he just sat there looking at her while she slept, for a whole hour he sat watching her and wondering what experiences were chronicled inside that sleeping brain under the soft blond baby curls. Thinking like that made him feel distanced from her, a stranger, as if she might wake up and ask him who he was and what he was doing in her bedroom.

That first evening he got home, he found her dressed up again and with make-up on. She looked like the Carol he had always known. There was nothing now to stop them going out in the evening. He thought that but he didn't say it aloud, he was shocked that he might have said it. They had the Turkish takeaway he had brought in with him and the wine he had bought on the way.

‘Let's get married, Carol,' he said. ‘If we make up our minds now we could be married in three weeks.'

She didn't answer him. Slowly she lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

‘If I was your husband, I could look after you better. I could shoulder some of this.'

‘I don't see what difference it makes,' she said.

He tried to persuade her. After a bit she said illogically, unfairly, ‘It's not your kid that's missing, that's probably got himself murdered.'

She had hurt him. She could hurt him more easily than anyone. But he stood up to it. ‘As good as,' he said. ‘It'd be as good as mine if we were married.'

She made him a devastating reply that silenced him.

‘A baby's part his mother and part his father and that's all there is to it. You can't alter that.'

He quoted that back to her next day. It was early evening and they were on their way back from the doctor's. The doctor had said to come back and see him next week and Carol had and got tranquillizers. She held on to his arm as they came into Winterside Down. It was the first time for a week she had touched him of her own volition and he was ashamed of feeling so happy.

‘Do you really feel that, what you said, about the kids being part of their father? I mean, I expect you feel that about Dave, I can understand that. You'd sort of
see
Dave in Ryan and Tanya . . .

‘I could see Jason's father in him then, couldn't I?'

Why had he asked? Why had he mentioned it? Until he met Carol, Barry had not known how serenity and contentment and peace can be cut off by a dozen indifferently uttered words. But I've no right to be happy, he thought, and it's only fair she's punishing me for it. He felt her hand tighten on his arm and he thought she was reassuring him, even saying she was sorry. He turned his face to hers. She was looking ahead of her at Beatie Isadoro walking towards them with Kelly in the pram and Karen and Dylan walking alongside.

Carol hadn't seen Beatie since Jason's disappearance. Beatie's vast shape in a pink mac over a green smock over a brown striped dress or skirt took up most of the pavement.

‘Get out of my way, you fat cow,' said Carol.

Beatie stared at her. ‘The police come up to me today,' she said. ‘I told them a thing or two about the marks I seen on that poor little baby you neglected.'

Barry didn't know what she meant. His parents had almost pulled themselves up into the middle class, and among the middle-class attitudes he had grown up with was dread of a scene in public. But before he could get Carol away, she had thrown herself on Beatie, punching and scratching. Karen screamed. Barry got hold of Carol and pulled her away but not before she had drawn blood on one of Beatie's slab-like cheeks and Beatie had kicked her on the shin. Carol sobbed in Barry's arms. People in front gardens and on doorsteps watched them, silent, impassive, curious. Most of them had not been born in England, but they had absorbed, sponge-like and as unconsciously as sponges, English ways of reacting. They watched with vague cold curiosity. Barry took Carol home, holding his arm round her as if she had been taken ill. On the corner of Shinwell Close, the motorbike boys stood, Hoopoe, Blue Hair and the Jamaican that Barry had heard someone call Black Beauty. He felt their eyes following him and Carol, though he wouldn't look back.

It was lucky they had the tranquillizers. They calmed Carol down. She was talking on the phone to Alkmini at the wine bar when Iris called in with Maureen. They had brought the evening paper with an article in it about all the children in the London area who had gone missing and never been found in the past five years. Jason's disappearance had sparked it off. Jason's name was the first to be mentioned.

Maureen was only comfortable in her own home. She always looked uneasy in other people's houses. She didn't take off her coat. It was the same straight, up-and-down
fawn raincoat she nearly always wore. She had flat brown shoes on and the hem of the raincoat came halfway down her thin calves. Her hair looked, Barry thought, as if she put her head under the tap, dragged the hair back as tight as it would go with a rubber band and let it dry that way. Although she wasn't a speedy person but rather slow and deliberate in her movements, she seemed unable to relax and wandered about the room picking things up as if looking for dust under them. She picked up Dave's photograph and studied it. You would have thought she had never seen it before.

Her voice had no rise and fall in it. It was low and lifeless.

‘Why didn't you have an abortion?' she said to Carol.

Carol looked at her and asked her what she meant, her tone the slow dangerous one Barry knew he would hate if it were ever directed against himself.

‘You told me when Dave was alive you didn't want any more kids. You could have had an abortion.'

‘She was scared,' said Iris with the air of someone giving what seems the most reasonable explanation while knowing it is not the true one. ‘You don't want to have those anaesthetics if you can avoid it.'

It was the tranquillizers, Barry thought, that stopped Carol flaring at Maureen. She had been looking at the paper in a listless way and now she laid it down.

‘I'm going back to work tomorrow,' she said. ‘I've got to go back sometime. It's no good hanging about here moping.'

‘That's true,' Iris said. ‘That won't bring Jason back.' Barry, in the recesses of his mind, feared Jason was dead and he knew Carol felt the same but Iris spoke as if he were dead beyond a doubt. She even looked cheerfully matter-of-fact about it. She lit a cigarette.

‘Work will take my mind off things,' said Carol.

It came as a shock to Barry. Somehow he had thought of her never going back. They would find Jason, dead or alive, and she would either have to stay home getting over
it or stay home to look after him. An awful, groundless, quite irrational thought came to him that perhaps they would never find Jason at all.

He didn't want Carol back in that wine bar with those men. But he wasn't her husband, he had no rights, he hadn't even a right to an opinion. How did those other, older, men deal with this kind of thing, how did they handle jealousy? How had Dave handled it? He liked her better made up and with her nails painted and wearing the stolen black and white dress but so would those others like her better. She was safer, more securely his, in the old grey jumper.

They watched television after Iris and Maureen had gone, sitting side by side on the settee. He took her hand and she let him hold it. The programme wasn't very compelling and his thoughts drifted away to Jason. He thought a lot about Jason, where he might be and what could have happened to him. Maureen's question had shocked him, though it was one he had sometimes dared to think about himself. Why hadn't Carol had an abortion? Was it because she had
loved
Jason's father?

He and Ken were working in the new office block just off Finchley High Road. It was a piece of luck they wanted the managing director's office panelled out in sapele wood and an even greater piece of luck that Ken had got the job. It was no more than half an hour after they started that the police came for him. Not Treddick this time but Detective Inspector Leatham and another man called Sergeant Dowson. Ken didn't say anything when they said they'd come to take Barry away for a bit to help them with a line of investigation but he looked incredulous.

In the car, no one said anything. Barry noticed that the driver took a route to the police station by way of Delphi Road and Rudyard Gardens, though it would have been easier and quicker to go straight down Lordship Avenue. Barry never used Rudyard Gardens. It was a depressing place, row after row of houses with their windows and
doors sealed off under corrugated metal – a quite reasonable method of ensuring that squatters and meths drinkers and glue sniffers didn't get in but sinister to look at for all that. And there was no chance of Jason or Jason's body being inside one of them. The previous weekend each one had been opened, the metal removed from back doors like lids from cans and the squat, damp, mould-smelling rooms searched. The street had been cordoned off section by section for the search to be carried out, and Barry, who had been shopping in Lordship Avenue for Carol, joined the crowd that was watching.

‘What would you say, Barry,' Dowson said when they were in one of the interview rooms, ‘if I told you a young chap answering your description was seen in Rudyard Gardens last Wednesday afternoon?'

It was the first time they had called him by his first name. It was possible though that this was just Dowson's technique. Barry was astonished by the question. Who had seen him?

‘It wasn't me. I never go down Rudyard Gardens. In the car just now was the first time since I started living here.'

Leatham pounced on that.

‘You know where it is all right then?'

Of course he did. Didn't it turn out of Lordship Avenue directly opposite Winterside Down? Hadn't he been there with Carol and the police and found Jason's lamb?

‘What's wrong with it then that you don't use it? Rudyard Gardens would be your shortest way through to Green Lanes.'

Barry knew why he didn't use it, because those boarded-up houses depressed him. Delphi Road or the canal bank, even though that passed nothing much but factories and warehouses and dumps, were more cheerful, but he didn't know how you explained that to men like Leatham and Dowson. They were both looking at him with impassive interested eyes. How to tell them Rudyard Gardens was a dead street, lined with the corpses of houses, all with
blinded eyes? They'll think I've been watching too many horror films, thought Barry, too much TV.

‘It's depressing,' he said. ‘No one about, nothing to look at. I like a bit of life.'

‘A bit of life?' Leatham made the phrase sound extreme and distasteful. Barry shrank awkwardly under his gaze, though he had nothing to feel awkward or guilty about.

‘A bit of excitement then,' he said and had the feeling he had made matters worse.

They wouldn't leave it. They refused to understand. Barry's mother had labelled him ‘too sensitive' years ago and he knew he had a lot of imagination, a lot of sensitivity to atmosphere. He knew too that an ordinary working man isn't supposed to be sensitive. That was for the middle class or for women. They kept on asking him about Rudyard Gardens. How did he know it was depressing if he never went down it? Had he ever tried? Just once or twice maybe? It got to lunchtime, and he thought they would let him go but they only took him into another interview room where they left him with another detective constable who didn't speak a word to him but sat behind a desk filling in forms. After about half an hour, someone came in with lunch for him on a tray – a Cornish pasty, some biscuits and a bit of cheese in a packet and a plastic cup of coffee.

Leatham returned with Dowson just when Barry was plucking up courage to tell the DC he was going, he couldn't hang about there all day.

‘You were saying how you liked a bit of excitement,' Leatham said as if there had been no break in the talk, as if a couple of hours hadn't passed by. ‘There can't have been much excitement living with Mrs Stratford with a little kid about.'

‘He's a good kid,' Barry said. They had been on this tack before. ‘He wasn't much trouble.'

‘Come on, Barry. A kid of under two not much trouble? I've got one of my own that age and I know just what trouble they are. And I'm used to it.'

Barry said, ‘We couldn't have gone out in the evenings anyway. My – Carol – Mrs Stratford works evenings.'

‘Thought she'd got herself a nice little unpaid nursemaid when she picked you, didn't she?'