Gold Digger (12 page)

‘Has she?’

Di nodded. Jones looked at her, listening for the sound of a cell door closing; a sound they both knew, just as she knew what she was like, ten years ago, once inside that cell, twisting and screaming, bashing herself against walls until they put on the straightjacket and then she was utterly silent. The memory scorched him. She looked at him.

‘Was it you called them, Jones? Was it you?’

‘No, on my fucking life it wasn’t.’

She nodded. She was cold and polite and yet shimmering with sweat. Silence fell in the room.

‘You don’t have to go, Di, you’re not under arrest,’ Jones said.
Not Yet.

‘I have to show willing,’ she said, with a grim little smile. She was distant and unreachable, pausing before asking. ‘Will you stay and watch? They want to check out anything I might have used for poison. They may as well find out what there is.’

She laughed, a horrible, frightened laugh. ‘Make sure they do it right.’

‘You don’t have to go.’

What did she mean, they may as well find it? Find what?

‘I do. It’s a test,’ she said. ‘A test.’

‘Talk to them, Di,’ he yelled after her. ‘Use your fucking voice. You ask the fucking questions.’

She went, quietly, tucked inside the car like an ugly toy.

‘Give me that,’ Jones said, snatching the search warrant out of the hands of a young policeman who was an open-mouthed rookie, not used to this nor a place like this and definitely in need of a leader. He read it quickly. Christ Almighty, it was a fuck-up; look at it, no one but a half wit would have issued a warrant as bad as this, in such a stupid
hurry, it was crazy. It confined them to the kitchen and its environs, as if obsessed by food. Jones kept them there, pointing at the words on the printout; otherwise they would have been all over the house.
No, you can’t go upstairs, nor down; it doesn’t cover that. No, you fucking can’t, stop that or there’ll be trouble
and by a miracle, and because they were rudderless, they obeyed him. It was dark by the time they had gone, taking away selected pots, pans, the feeding equipment, all Thomas’s survival machinery, part of the scullery and fuck all else. Enough left for her to carry on. He learned that this sorry crew had only been pulled off an aborted job and sent on this to give them something to do, thank heaven for small fucking mercies.

Fuckit. Jones waited and phoned. He sat in the hallway by the redundant front door and waited, working it out.
If someone really has it in for Di, they’ve given info and some fucker’s believed it. They weren’t supposed to come until morning, at least, but these idiots needed a job. Supposing someone was supposed to come along and plant some evidence they were supposed to find? Oh shut up Jones, fucking paranoid git.

And still, he waited. He sat in the hall and waited. Used his phone for updates, waited. His contacts had gone home. He thought of Di and Thomas, the way they were. She thought no one else knew, but he did. She looked after him good; he had to say that and if she killed him it was for pity, but why did she wait? And why, he asked himself, am
I
waiting in the pitch dark? Thomas’s kids, they hate her. (Christ, they even tried to hire me.) And Quig’s around, I can feel it, and supposing this lot got together? As if. You are one fucking paranoid git, Jones; you really fucking are. You’ve been dreaming of bloody Quig.

He waited. And then, suddenly in the silence of the
house, there was a rustling from outside the front door and there, framed against the stained glass, a figure, trying to get in. A shadowy substance leaning, turning the handle, pushing. Jones could see him, forcing his way inside, trying to plant his evidence, his little bit of filth, a little bit of dirt. That would be the plan. A little suggestion that Di had not taken care, that was all it needed. Put a bit of filth in the kitchen, plant a few germs, a single turd. What would someone plant that would incriminate her? Condoms, deadly nightshade, anything would do. Anything to suggest negligence; anything to suggest she had a vested interest in hastening the death, even the presence of another man. What would he have planted? Salmonella or porn? Or maybe the man was calling to see Di herself. And if he were Quig, he’d bring a rat; that’s what he’d bring; he’d bring vermin, dead or alive.

Someone was trying to fiddle with the disused front door and it had to be someone with out of date information, because no one had used that door in years.

Jones flung himself against the door and put his mouth to the glass, so that his lips were pressed against it. ‘Give us a kiss, you bastard! Kissy, kissy,’ he yelled. ‘Fuck off, you cunt. Don’t even think of it. It’s too late. You’re too fucking late. They’ve taken it all away. Is that you, Quig, is that you?’

The figure disappeared into the November mist like a ghost, as if he had never been. Maybe he hadn’t, maybe it was nothing but paranoia and yesterday’s hangover from dreaming of Quig. Jones stood back, trembling. Shook himself like a dog, tidied up, left a note, saying
call me
, hoping she would, and thinking she wouldn’t. Di wouldn’t thank him for being here. She really would not want Uncle Jones and he wished she did. He prayed for her, spoke to her.
Shout at them, Di. They ain’t got nothing. Warrant’s fucked, and I’ll be raising Cain if you aren’t back in the morning.

T
he interview room was larger than a cell, and she could smell the cells on the way towards it. They left her waiting, behind a locked door. She was waiting while listening to the offstage sounds, breathing deeply, thinking of Thomas’s diary files, of something he had written over a year ago.
Today,
he wrote
, we went to the bay to see the geese in flight. I’ve had to get Her Laziness out of bed to go at first light and she does need her sleep, whereas I need less, but I have never seen a creature so revived by a cup of tea. Crosspatch turns human, and so do I.

She thought of that day, and other days. She felt in the pocket of her old coat and found the outline of shells: how many hours had they spent, inspecting shells. She felt sand in her fingers, closed her mind and put herself back by the sea. The panic receded.

The interview proceeded. Two men and an older woman, who looked doubtful. Di did not meet their eyes, nor they hers.

I’m not in a cell, the door is open and I have to breathe deeply. There is no reason to be silent. Help with enquiries. Talk; be aggressive, even though the prevailing colour is a sort of sick, mustard yellow. Think of a painting … that one of the Poor House, the same coloured walls. Don’t let them smell the fear. Talk
. She hid her clenched hands under a scarred desk, and said anything that came into her head.

‘My, my,’ she said. ‘You could do with a coat of paint in here as well as a few pictures. Maybe some nice, peaceful scenes with water, like they have in hospital waiting rooms. Even a bit of graffiti.’

‘Mrs Porteous, you’re helping us with our enquiries.’

‘A few watercolours, a tapestry, something bright. Curtains.’

‘Your late husband.’

‘A tablecloth,’ she gabbled. ‘That would do. My husband died, you know.Four days ago, or is it five? What kept you so long? You could do with some pictures in here.’

She looked at the contours of the corners, looked at the ceiling, looked at anything but them. She turned the room into a picture of itself, hummed manically. What was the line from the poem Thomas taught her:
It is fear, little hunter, only fear.

‘Mrs Porteous. It’s for us to ask the questions.’

He was a portly man, sweating a bit in this overwarm room. She remembered sitting in a room like this, wearing a paper suit, after they had taken away her clothes. She took off her coat; then she took off the sweater beneath, slowly while they looked at her in alarm, paralysed, not moving to stop her, wondering if she was going to strip. She sat back.

‘Well, ask the questions then. Is this about the post mortem?’

‘Post mortem hasn’t happened yet. It’s not about that.’

Di shut her eyes against a sudden overpowering jolt of sheer, physical agony; a vision of his thin, wiry body lying in darkness all these days. She put her hands over her mouth. ‘I thought they did it at once. I thought … ’

‘Doesn’t always work like that,’ the woman said, leaning forward, seeing the distress. ‘There’s a queue, this time of year.’

Di thought of the days they came home with feathers and shells. Ate scrambled eggs. Grief came in like a wave, coming in and going on a slipstream of sheer, redemptive anger.

‘Why am I here, then?’

‘We have information—’

‘What information? What real, concrete information?’

They looked sideways. She was tapping her foot on the floor.

‘Information that indicates you isolated your husband, neglected him, forbade his children to visit, and this alone makes his death suspicious, since you had sole care of him. Perhaps you can understand, Mrs Porteous, that we have to investigate.’

Tap, tap, tap
; her foot on the floor unnerving them.

‘No, I don’t get it. If no one’s done the post mortem yet, there’s nothing to ask. What information can there be, except rumour? You really do need to do this room, you know. Pink, blue, anything but this.’

‘Not at liberty to say,’ the man said.

She looked around. It was the constant grime she had hated, the omnipresent grease, surfaces always slightly slippery to the touch. Impenetrable walls, invoking helplessness in the innocent as well as the guilty, and at the moment, she did not know which she was. Oh yes, she had loved him, and oh yes, she had wanted him to die. Because
he
wanted it. She closed her eyes. Reached for the old coat, to stick her hand in the pocket and feel the sand. Did it only take half an hour for the geese to fly by this time last year, or was it three? This time last year.

Di opened her eyes and glared at them.

‘No one forbade his children to visit. Quite the opposite. Is that what they say? Are they the source of the information?’

There was another uncomfortable silence. She put the sweater back on, then the coat.

‘They wouldn’t visit. Shame on you,’ she said. ‘You’ve kept
me here for three hours, for nothing. Someone’s put you up to this. I’m going now.’

She rose and no one stopped her, or observed that she could scarcely walk while wanting, desperately, to run. She was slow and determined, rigidly controlled, scenting the air outside like an animal. The older woman walked her out. Di could smell that peculiar cell smell of bleach, urine and desperation.

‘Ok, we jumped the gun,’ the woman said, grudgingly. ‘Bloody men, know what I mean. I told them … hey, whatever happened to your hair?’

Di fixed her eyes on the exit. The shaking would start again when she got outside. She turned to the woman.

‘I get it fixed tomorrow. What about yours? Who made the report?’

‘Can’t tell you. Someone jumped the gun, that’s all.’ She leaned towards Di. ‘All I can tell you is, it wasn’t Jones.’

W
hen she got out of the taxi with the key in her hand, she saw that Jones had left the lights on. She read the note and did not phone him. The kitchen looked much the same; the snug, tidier and barer. They had taken Thomas’s processed food and feeding equipment, left the same, sanitised oven. The idiots. The shaking began again, and then subsided, because she had won, she had taken control, for a while, passed a test. She drank the brandy, carefully, smoked a cigar, sat at the computer. Tomorrow, she would do exactly what she had planned to do. Smarten up, get out of here. Go to London.

Don’t deviate. Be passionate and dispassionate, Di. Remember who you are. Remember who was proud of you. Write down what happened. Write something every day.

Sleep now. Think of summer. Control the breathing. Put the fears in order of priority.
An image of her father rose to mind, along with the conviction that he was close by. She supplanted him with another image; the geese over the bay this time of year. That was the way it worked. You displaced ugliness by thinking of something effortlessly beautiful, like a piece of flint. She would go tomorrow. So much to do, tomorrow.

Where was Saul?

A
dark, winter morning.

Morning was a different creature to night; easier to rationalise in the morning and even this poor daylight made everything simpler. She had been taught to analyse what she saw with such joy; she was growing an ice chip in her heart, forming a lens through which to see. It was only Thomas’s opinion of her that counted. It did not matter that she was neither liked nor loved in a town she loved dearly, and perversely loved even more, now. So much so that she was dreading leaving it, postponing the moment of movement by sitting in his chair, looking at the screen.

She was reading an article she had found online.

Collectors,
the screen informed her
, must not be confused with the art-lover, or the person who is simply interested in art. The urge to possess, bring together objects, is inseparable from the taste for the unusual and the flair for discovery. As soon as man developed a sense of beauty and the ability to choose, he felt the fascination of coming under the spell of coveted objects.

Collectors have been treated as the victims of a disease, with four main symptoms: the possessive instinct, the necessity for spontaneous activity, the desire to surpass oneself and the need for social standing. The collector is by definition inseparable from
a love of risk or battle. Supremely unsociable by nature, he has no self confidence apart from his conquests, which recall the moments when he has, to some extent, mastered his fate. He may even feel obliged to keep his collection from the sullying gaze of alien eyes.

With few exceptions, the screen said, the great collectors are self-made men, who began life shining other peoples’ shoes. They may have wanted to establish a personalised, grander past. Master their own fate.

‘Rubbish,’ Di said to the screen. Her irritation with this googled script of cod analysis from a learned source made her uneasy. First because although she was addicted to keyboard and screen, she could never quite trust the text as much as she would if she had seen it in a book. Pictures were another matter; text was less convincing, somehow.