Mystery Man (13 page)

We were on our way to visit Anne Mayerova in her new home – Purdysburn Hospital. Daniel Trevor had told us where she was, although only after he'd gotten over the heart attack he suffered when we told him that actually he
hadn't
over-reacted to the news of Manfredd's sudden death, and that we now believed there
was
a killer on our trail, and that he should take steps to ensure his own continued well-being.

He said, 'I'm surrounded by poets and there's a sculptor in the back bedroom. He wouldn't really attempt anything here, would he?'

Poets, not largely known for their fighting ability.

'I'm sure you'll be fine,' I said. 'Do you think her husband will be at the hospital?'

No, was the answer. His name was Mark Smith, but they'd been divorced for twenty-five years and had two grown-up children. She was a teacher, so she probably told people that she had
thousands
of kids, like Mr Chips. Teachers did that. It was bollocks.

As we drove, flashing through amber lights and taking off over speed bumps, with Alison passing time between them by doing a passable impression of the weaver bird, she said: 'Purdysburn, is that not where all the nut jobs go?'

'I believe it has a wide range of patients.'

'I always heard it was all the psychos. When I was growing up you were always teased about going to Purdysburn. If you did anything stupid people would say, you should be in Purdysburn. If you acted the eejit they'd say—'

'I understand it's changed.'

'Well I hope she's not barking, we need to know her secret.'

I still wasn't convinced that we actually did. There is sometimes a great comfort in ignorance. For a long time I didn't know that Canberra really was the capital of Australia, then for a long time after I did find out I worried about why it was. Anne's secret was not our business; our only duty was to warn her about the imminent possibility of her dying violently.

About a mile away from Purdysburn I came across the Rosemary Trevor file, or at least the manila folder that had once held it. It was impossible to say if it had been deliberately taken, or was lying mixed with the many hundreds of pages I'd left on the floor of Malcolm Carlyle's office. I am methodical to the point of obsession, but the circumstances of our second visit next door were hardly conducive to an organised search, what with my dust allergy and the mouldering body in the next room. Alison registered my sigh of disappointment, but did not comment.

We pulled into a hospital car park busy with people arriving for evening visiting time.

As Alison parked, and then switched off the engine and opened her door, I said: 'We should have just phoned.'

She looked at me. 'What's the point in that? We have to look in the horse's mouth and check its teeth.'

'I feel a bit carsick,' I said.

She closed the door again and sat beside me. 'It'll settle in a minute,' she said.

'If you want to go on in, I'll catch you up.'

'Me? I'm the sidekick, you're my main man.'

I
liked
that. Not
the
main man.
My
main man. It was time to step up to the plate. To release the hounds. To marshal the troops. To gird the loins. It wasn't about saving an old woman's life . . . well, yes it was . . . but it was also about impressing this young lady. About showing her what I was capable of. That I amounted to more than the sum of my parts. My only problem was that I couldn't quite get out of the van. I was torn. I often suffer this problem in car parks, particularly at night. It's the way headlamps flash across the jagged rows of licence plates causing some to
jump!
out at you. I had a notebook in the glove compartment. I didn't want to write them all down. That would be mental. I just wanted the ones that called to me. There weren't that many of them. Given the circumstances I thought I was probably better to just sit there for a while and memorise them and then jot them down later. The problem was that some of the cars were parked facing out, and some facing in, and I couldn't be sure that the magic numbers worked at both ends, and what it meant if they did, or didn't.

Alison said, 'Are you coming?'

'Yes,' I said.

'You're always thinking, aren't you?'

'Never switch off,' I agreed.

Alison went up to the reception desk and told them who we were here to visit. These days Pursdysburn was Bedlam Lite, but it didn't mean they wouldn't spring the butterfly net on you if they didn't like the cut of your jib. I hung back. She said we were cousins, that we hadn't seen Aunt Anne in a long time and felt bad about it. The receptionist said she was sure it would be okay. Then she smiled at me and asked how I was.

'Fine,' I said.

'Friendly,' said Alison as we walked to the elevator.

It was an old Victorian redbrick that seemed to resent the presence of a modern elevator. We rattled up to the third floor. I held my breath the whole way. I always do. I once nearly expired in a twenty-seven-storey office block.

On the walk along the corridor to the ward a doctor nodded at me and said, 'How're you doing?'

'Fine,' I said. To Alison I said, 'He comes into the shop.'

'Popular man,' she said.

We had to be buzzed into the ward. It was really to stop those within from getting out, but it worked both ways. This nurse looked at me oddly, as if unsure if I was coming or going. Alison asked how Aunt Anne had been and the nurse gave her the soft-shoe shuffle, the way they're supposed to.

There were eight beds in the ward. Anne Mayerova was in the last on the right, curtained off. Two of the other women had visitors; three were asleep. The light was quite low. There was no wailing television. The smell was antiseptic mixed with canteen food. The nurse pulled the curtain back slowly and said, 'Anne, dear, look, your niece and nephew are here to see you!' with exaggerated bonhomie.

Anne Mayerova sat in a chair by the side of the bed and regarded us with hooded eyes. Her liver-spotted arms, thin as sparrow legs, jutted out of a pink nightdress. There it was on her inner arm – the vague tattoo of a serial number. Her skin was pulp-magazine flaky and her white hair was long at the back and wispy on top. She looked like the old woman in
Titanic,
the one you wanted to push over the rails.

'I've never seen them before in my life,' she said.

'Of course you have!' The nurse moved around, smoothing down the bed covers, and in an only slightly lower voice said to us, 'She gets confused.'

Anne Mayerova's eyes flitted towards her. There was confusion there, but also defiance. 'I don't have any brothers or sisters.'

The nurse smiled indulgently and left us to it. Anne Mayerova looked at us suspiciously. 'Nieces and nephews,' she said, 'would have brought grapes.'

'Nieces and nephews wouldn't,' I said, 'in case you choked on them.'

I meant it to be caring and concerned, but Alison looked at me. I was nervous. My heart was palpitating way above the normal palpitations. It was hot and sticky in the ward. The fluorescent light hummed irritatingly. There were bugs stuck in there. Stuck, or plotting.

'Miss Mayerova,' Alison said, 'of course we're not your niece and nephew. We work for your publisher, we just weren't sure if they'd let us in if we weren't relatives.'

'For Rosemary?'

'Yes, Rosemary.'

'She doesn't come to see me.'

'She sent us instead.'

'Why?'

Alison glanced at me, and then thought better of it. 'Because she's unwell.'

Anne Mayerova shook her head sadly. 'I haven't done my homework.'

'Well you haven't been well either, have you?'

While Alison engaged Anne in conversation I took advantage of the distraction to examine the chart at the bottom of the bed. I flicked back to her medication list and saw that she was being treated with a heavy dose of Effexor XL, which I knew to be an anti-depressant, and Priadel, which I knew to be lithium, for bipolar disorder, and Solpadol, a codeine phosphate, for pain. In the old days they would have given her a lobotomy and left her to rot.

I've had a close shave with a lobotomy, but that's a different story.

I had a private flashback. When I reconnected, Anne was almost in tears. 'But what am I supposed to do? They don't let me write, not in here. When I was at home . . .' She stared out of a window that overlooked the floodlit fields surrounding Purdysburn. On the bright side, I supposed, at least the lights weren't ranging back and forth.

'Don't worry about it,' said Alison.

I didn't like it here; even passing through reception it had felt like someone had reached into my chest and was squeezing my heart. It was time to cut to the chase.

'We think someone may try—'

Alison immediately cut off my
to kill you
with: '. . . to help you out.' She gave me another admonishing look and knelt down beside the old woman. She softly cupped one of her spindly hands.
'Us,
in fact. We thought that if
you
told
us
what you still had to write in the book, then we could take that to Rosemary and she could decide exactly what to do.'

'But I told her already.'

'Well because she's been unwell she's forgotten a lot of it and she'd really like you to tell us again, if you can. I know you don't like talking about it, but perhaps just this one more . . .'

'No . . . no, I
do . . .
it was my greatest performance, you see.' There was, suddenly, a light in her eyes. Alison patted her hand. 'Mark said it was magical.'

'Your husband?' Alison asked. 'He was in the camp with you?'

'Of course. We were
lovers
.' And despite her years, the smile she gave us was that of a girlie teenager. Alison grinned up at me. She indicated the edge of the bed for me to sit. I remained where I was. I was agitated. I was blinking rapidly. I wanted to say hurry up, get on with it, this isn't
Jackanory,
visiting time will soon be over and if we don't get out quick we may be overlooked and they may seal off the ward and shut the gates and turn off the lights and we might never again know freedom. In the echoing halls of night the soldier ants in leather boots would march up and down, making sure nobody ventured from their rooms, or spoke or breathed any more than they had to. I wanted to say this, couldn't. I stood there sweating and palpitating and edging towards a faint. But then Anne Mayerova did what I had least suspected she would be capable of: this confused old woman began to tell us her story, and we were mesmerised.

A shocked sobriety had descended on Alison. She drove more carefully than I normally did. It was nearly eleven o'clock and the roads were damp and quiet. We were the last to leave the hospital. Our attention to Anne's story had been so rapt that when she finished and closed her eyes, and the tears of joy were on her cheeks, I turned away to wipe my own eyes, and only realised then that we had an audience, that two of the ward nurses and three other patients had quietly moved up to listen.

Now, with the streetlights easing past, I glanced several times at my sidekick. I didn't like to see her so quiet. She was usually so chirpy. She was my antidote.

We turned off the Lisburn Road and pulled up in front of a three-storey house that had been converted into apartments. In the past, in all the times I had followed her, I had never quite made it all the way to her home; partially out of fear of what I might discover, or do – standing in a garden and peering through a window has gotten me into trouble before – but usually because I'd become distracted, either by licence plates or the changing sequence of traffic signals. Now as she switched off the No Alibis engine she nodded across and said, 'Mine's the bottom one. It costs me an arm and a leg.'

I nodded.

'You're thinking about them, aren't you?' she asked.

'I can't imagine you without an arm or leg.'

She tutted. 'All those poor people.'

I nodded. Actually I'd been counting the lamp-posts between Purdysburn and where we were now. I can compartmentalise. What had happened to Anne Mayerova was filed away, to be dealt with during the long hours of sleeplessness later. For now I sat waiting for Alison to get out so that I could sidle over into her place for the drive home.

She said, 'After something like that, it doesn't feel right to be alone.'

I was studying the petrol gauge. The van was precisely half empty. Although that presumed that the reading was accurate. And that I hadn't been cheated with pirated, watered-down fuel.

'Do you want to come in?'

'No.'

'Okay.'

She still didn't move.

The van was diesel, but remarkably quiet.

'Are you sure? You could meet my husband.'

My eyes flitted up.

'Only joking,' she said. And then, after another long silence, she added: 'I mean, you could meet my wife.'

After another while I said, 'Your wife?'

'No,
stoopid
.' She smiled. 'How do you like your toast?'

'Burned,' I said.

'So would you be coming in for that, or will I bring it out on a plate?'

I was wondering why, if the engine was switched off, the petrol gauge was continuing to give a half-full reading. It may have been that it was not only inaccurate, but completely malfunctioning. That as soon as I drove away, the No Alibis van would run out of fuel and I would find myself marooned in the wastelands of South Belfast.

'Tell you what,' Alison said, 'I'm going to go in now, but I'm going to leave my front door on the latch. If you decide you want some toast, you just come on in, okay?' I nodded. She leant across and kissed me on the cheek. I didn't know where to put myself. Hand-holding and a kiss on the cheek
in one day.
'Listen,' she said, 'don't let it get to you. It was sixty, nearly seventy years ago. You can't beat yourself up about history. She's a lovely old woman with a sad and happy story. We may not know exactly what the big secret is, but at least we've tipped off the security people there to keep an eye on her. There's nothing more we can really do.'

I nodded.

'So I'm going in now. Raspberry or strawberry?'