Exile (30 page)

“My name is DC Bunyan from the Metropolitan Police. I’m trying to contact Ms. Findlay in relation to her cousin James Harris. Could you tell me how I could get hold of her?”

“Ye could phone her work.”

“Where is that?”

“Place of Safety Shelters. If ye can’t get her they’ll take a message.”

Sarah was very tired. Her crisp blouse was flaccid, her hair looked dull and she had changed her shoes into a pair of badly burst men’s leather slippers. She couldn’t even get excited by the fresh Chelsea buns Maureen had bought in the village and they used to be her favorite. She showed Maureen upstairs to her bedroom. “This should do you,” she said.

The cornicing on the ceiling was a continuous run of delicate leaves and grapes. The bed was large and soft. At the foot of it, balanced on a stool, stood a white plastic television with a rotation knob. A little door at the side of the room led up a step into a black marble en suite bathroom with blistered mirrors on the wall and verdigris stain dribbling from the taps. “Perhaps you’d like a wash before dinner?”

“I don’t think I can stay awake for dinner,” said Maureen, and Sarah looked relieved.

“Well, feel free to go straight to bed,” she said. “Make yourself at home. There’s hot water and plenty of towels.”

“If I ever go into labor in anyone’s house, I want it to be yours.”

Sarah didn’t understand the joke but she saw Maureen smiling and mirrored her. She must have had a rotten day.

“Thanks for letting me stay,” said Maureen.

“You are most welcome,” said Sarah.

Maureen took a bath but the water was so hard she could barely muster a head of foam from the soap and an oily husk formed on the surface of the water. She dried herself with a towel and her skin felt scaly, squeaking like a glass fresh from a dishwasher.

When she came out of the bathroom she found a silver galley tray on the little table by the bed. Sarah had brought her a big mug of tea and a lukewarm plate of strong kedgeree. As Maureen ate, her eye fell on the bedside table and a crumbling black leather Bible held together with elastic bands, set at an angle, pointing at her bed. Sarah must have a hundred family Bibles. Maureen climbed across the bed, turning on the black and white telly before lifting the cold linen sheets and sliding in. She fell asleep listening to a television consumer program warning her to be very, very careful which dealer she bought her Land Rover from.

Leslie knocked at the door softly and stepped back. The sharp wind whirled down the veranda, gathering the litter and dust into rustling bundles in the far corner. If it wasn’t to save Isa she wouldn’t have promised to come over after work. She knocked again and the door was opened by a small blonde in a severe suit.

“Hello, Leslie?”

“Yeah, are you Bunyan?”

“Come in.” She opened the door wide and Leslie saw Jimmy sitting in his armchair, looking knackered and terrified. He raised his hand in a limp greeting and she nodded back. His eyes were very red. The babies were sitting on the floor in front of him, and Alan, the boy she had met the night before, was standing behind him holding on to the top of Jimmy’s arm as if he were huckling him. A fat bald guy with gold specs stood in the middle of the living room, holding a bunch of photographs and watching her. The wee boy from the Polaroid looked around the door at her. “Hiya,” he said, and looked at her crash helmet. ‘Are you a polis?”

“No.” Leslie stepped into the hall. It was freezing in the flat and she wished to fuck she’d brought a jumper. She looked at the woman. “Why do ye have to go all the way to Carlisle?”

“Oh”—the woman rolled her eyes—”we want to tape the interview and because we’re an English force it has to be in England.”

“That’s a bit mad, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Leslie,” said Jimmy, “thanks for coming over.”

“No bother, Jimmy,” said Leslie. “Are ye just off, then?”

The woman in the suit looked at the fat guy and he looked at Leslie. “Actually, Ms. Findlay, we wanted to talk to you as well.” His accent was tempered Glaswegian and he breathed in as he spoke, swallowing his words.

“Tae me?” said Leslie, sensing that something was amiss. “What about?”

“I understand you work at the Place of Safety Shelters?”

Leslie frowned.

“Could I ask you to step outside with me for a minute?”

Leslie looked at Jimmy’s blank face. The fat guy led her back through the hall and onto the windy balcony, pulling the door shut behind him. “I’m very sorry,” he said, and smiled. “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m DI Williams, Arthur Williams, from the Met.” He leaned on the balcony ridge and looked out over the traffic, at the big orange buses stopping to pick up passengers and the cars trapped behind them. “Do you know anything about the circumstances under which Mrs. Harris left the shelter?”

“Yeah, I do. I told you guys about it on the phone. She got a letter or something and disappeared a couple of hours later.”

The fat guy clicked his fingers and pointed at her as if he had just remembered. “That’s right, it came in the post and you couldn’t understand how anyone would know the address.”

Leslie took out her fags and cupped her hand around the lighter as she lit up. “I think I know what she got in the letter as well.”

“What?”

“A photograph. A Polaroid that was left among her things. It’s a picture of her kid”—she thumbed back to the house—”the second one. He was with a pretty heavy guy.”

“Do you still have the Polaroid?”

Leslie took a draw and exhaled into the wind. “Ah, no, I don’t, my friend’s got it.”

“Can you get it for me?”

“Well, I can’t contact her just now.”

The fat guy nodded over the street. “I see, I see.” He reached into his pocket. “I’ve got one of you, actually.” He pulled out a handful of photos and looked through them, his face lighting up when he found what he was looking for, and he handed it to her. “See?”

Leslie looked at the picture. It was Christmas Day at the shelter. Ann and Senga and the other residents were standing stiffly in front of the plastic tree. Leslie was behind them, growling at the camera, her pupils fiery red. The timer had run out but the camera had failed. She was cursing and just about to come round and see what had gone wrong when it finally went off. “That’s right.” She smiled. “That’s me. Where did you get these?”

“Where do you think I got them?”

“From the office?”

“Nope.”

He was smiling quite benignly, seemed quite personable, and Leslie didn’t feel a threat. She handed the picture back to him. “Well, you must have got it from the office. We only had eight copies done, one for the office and one for each resident.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I had the copies made. I know there were eight copies.”

The fat man stood up straight and licked the back of his teeth. “These,” he said, pointedly, “are Ann’s.”

She snorted a laugh. “Nah,” she said. “Ann left hers at the shelter. I’ve got Ann’s copies.”

“We found these in Mr. Harris’s house.”

She was suddenly aware that it was no accident. The fat guy had placed himself between her and the stairs.

“If I was working on the assumption that Mr. Harris killed his wife,” he said, his quiet voice barely audible above the traffic, “I’d have to explain how he found her again after she went into hiding, wouldn’t I?”

Leslie leaned heavily on the balcony and took a long, deep draw on her fag. “Look, I’ve been working there for four years, paid and unpaid. D’ye think I’d jeopardize all that to tell him she was there? I just met this joker for the first time last night.”

Fat bloke was very surprised. “Last night?”

“Yeah,” said Leslie aggressively. “Last night.”

“But he’s your cousin.”

“We lost touch.”

“So, an attractive young woman like you would drop everything on a Friday night and come over and babysit for him? Offer to stay the night if necessary? He must have made quite an impression.”

She shook her head adamantly. “Listen, I’m not doing it for him. If I don’t babysit, my mum’ll do it and she’s got a heart condition.”

But he wasn’t listening, he was looking at the bundle of photographs in his hand. “You had the copies made, did ye?”

Chapter 32

SMOKY LEMON

Maureen woke up at six o’clock and found the television still on at her feet. She hadn’t dreamed of anything but still couldn’t get back to sleep. She knew Sarah would be uncomfortable if she wandered around the house on her own so she stayed in her room and had another bath. After watching half an hour of Stock Exchange news on breakfast TV her sense of probity gave way to her desire for a coffee and a fag. She put the dirty dishes from last night’s dinner on the tray and crept quietly downstairs to the kitchen.

The Aga had cooled during the night but still gave off a little warmth and Maureen pulled a chair over to it, sitting with her hip against it, hanging over the griddle with her cup of coffee. Sarah had left a bundle of Jesus pamphlets on the table. Each had a catchy title on the cover and mesmerizingly bad drawings of Aryan Jesus telling some black people what to do, Jesus having a laugh with some sheep, baby Jesus chortling in a manger. Sarah had never been into religion, as far as Maureen knew. She vaguely remembered her referring to her family as high Church of England, implying that in some way this was Catholicism by another name.

The windows at the back of the kitchen looked out onto a long, immaculate lawn with deep borders, cloaked in freezing fog. Sarah’s life must be an aesthetic delight; she must cast her eye over lovely things every day. Maureen had been so busy keeping her head above water that she had forgotten the significance of having beautiful things around her, things she wanted to touch and look at. She thought of Jimmy and the paucity of charm in his life, the incessant nag of need and want. The child-benefit book had been cashed and she felt sure that Moe, the Giro Magnet, would know something about it. Maureen was still sure Jimmy hadn’t done it. He said he’d only been in London for a day and the mattress still bothered her.

She searched all the cupboards and set the table for a formal breakfast. She warmed the teapot and put out thick-cut marmalade and cereal bowls. She brought two small camellia blossoms in from the garden and put them in a glass of water, sitting them on the table as a centerpiece. The red flowers clashed with the blue striped Cornishware, making the table look Christmassy and cheerful.

Carrying her fags and Vik’s lighter, she pulled open the back door and stepped out into the restful garden, lit a fag and looked around her. In the very far distance she could hear the distant rumble of a city making its way to work. The milky fog was lifting from the ground, floating above the grass, rising up to meet the morning. Maureen inhaled and felt the nicotine trickle into her system, tickling her fingers, opening her hair follicles, placating the angry rims of her eyes, kicking her into the day. She looked back into the kitchen and saw a three-foot-high pile of old newspapers tucked away into the recess by the back door, awaiting recycling. She finished her fag quickly, rubbing it out on the stone step, and binned the ragged filter.

She lifted out all the Evening Standards for the previous week, Monday to Monday, and took them over to the clear end of the large table. She skimmed through, looking for some mention of the murder. It would have taken the police a few days to identify Ann and trace her back to the shelter. They had phoned the office looking for Leslie on Tuesday so Maureen checked last Thursday’s edition but found nothing. She went back and checked the Friday edition again and found nothing. She checked Monday, poring over the smallest story, trying to get a lead. She was reading a tiny story about an art fair when she looked up to rub her eyes and spotted it: “Bike Crash Leads to Gruesome Find.” A guy on his way to work had been involved in a motorbike accident and landed on a mattress on the riverbank with a body inside it. The man had no comment but a member of the Thames division said that the body matched the description of a missing woman. The police were treating the woman’s death as suspicious. The next day’s edition named her as Ann Harris, a woman reported missing by her sister only days before. Maureen tidied away the papers and went back out to the garden for another smoke.

She found it bizarre that Moe had reported Ann missing. Ann didn’t live with her, she had been missing before, and Maureen knew a bit about the reality of living with a drinker. If Ann was away on a binge, and the police found her and brought her back, she’d be looking for money and bringing trouble. Mood swings and grandiloquent claims went with the territory in alcoholic families and Ann saying she was running for her life was probably a monthly occurrence. If Moe was screwing the brew she definitely wouldn’t want to draw official attention to herself. It didn’t make sense for Moe to report her missing.

Sarah appeared at the kitchen door in a man’s old tartan dressing gown and the exploding leather slippers. “Good morning, good morning,” she said. “Oh, you’ve set the table?”

“Sarah, you’ve been so sweet to me.” Maureen stood up. “I’m making you breakfast this morning.”

Sarah all but clapped her hands with glee. “Oh, how lovely,” she said, and sat down at her place while Maureen made the toast. They were halfway through breakfast when Sarah put her fingertips on the bundle of Jesus pamphlets and pushed them across the table to Maureen. “Why not have a read while you’re eating?” she said.

Maureen smiled. “You’re fucking joking, aren’t you?” she said, and the atmosphere deteriorated from there.

Maureen was on the wrong train. She got off at London Bridge and began the long walk to Brixton. It was only nine o’clock and she didn’t have much to do before she met Kilty Goldfarb again. As she walked she looked up at the office blocks, a thousand windows with forty, fifty workers behind each of them every day of the week, each one trying to believe that they were the central character in the big movie. She watched the tube sucking people underground, saw the busy buses and the individual cars jammed bumper to bumper, saw the stream of pedestrians overspill from the pavement into the road, heads down, pretending that no one else existed, as if the knowledge of their number was too much to bear. And it was. Maureen was utterly convinced of her own insignificance.