Shallow Be Thy Grave (7 page)

Jo was standing at the kitchen window, pulling back the blinds, and peering out into the dark corridor outside. “He said tell them Bruno needs to see them. Do you think he’s Bruno?”

“I don’t know. Do you think Brigitte’s a prostitute?”

Jo dropped the blind back into position and turned to face back into the room. “It hardly seems likely. I mean you wouldn’t invite someone to crash on your bedroom floor if you were a working girl, would you, surely?”

“So why’d you ask him if he was her pimp?”

“I was just trying to find out who he was.  I was trying to unsettle him.”

Lily nodded uncertainly.  Someone was unsettled, that was for sure, but she didn’t think it was Bruno.

They didn’t know what else to do, so they locked the front door and smoked another spliff. Jo wanted to test whether the taste of Imperial Leather lessened if she used grass from the centre of the bundle. It didn’t. 

“How come you knew the French for pimp?” asked Lily.

Jo said something quickly in French. She noticed Lily’s confused expression and smiled. “It means your mother’s a prostitute and your father’s her pimp. It was one of the first things I learned to say.”

“Do you think we should go to the police?” asked Lily.

“And what? Tell them we broke into a flat that belongs to a girl we’ve never met. And then we let some dodgy bloke in who nicked the illegal drugs we’d smuggled into the country, and your half-sister’s diary that we happened to be reading at the time?”

“It’s still theft,” said Lily, in a quieter voice.

“We’d probably be locked up quicker than you can say respondez s’il vous plait.”

Lily sighed and pulled at her dreadlocks, like she wanted to rip the hair from her head.

“We should try and get in touch with that friend she mentioned in the diary,” said Jo. “Grace, with the kids – what were they called Angelina and something?”

“Dunno,” said Lily..

“They must have told someone where they were going. Although, obviously not Bruno. Can’t think why, he seems so charming.” Jo hesitated. “Maybe Brigitte was a prostitute. Perhaps she has a place where she sees clients somewhere nearby.”

Lily sensed Jo was warming to her theme.

Jo got up off the settee, stood at the side of the kitchen table and pressed her fingertips down on it, like she was speaking from a lectern. “Maybe that’s why they decided to go inter-railing - to get away from all this. You know what Fiona’s like. She’s probably trying to save Brigitte, liberate her from sex slavery.”

“She’ll be mega pissed off if she finds out we’ve let Bruno take her diary.”

“Probably best we don’t mention that,” said Jo. “Do you think Bruno was his name? He could have meant someone else, couldn’t he? He said ‘tell her Bruno wants to see her’. But that doesn’t mean he’s Bruno.”

Lily didn’t answer. She got up from the table, didn’t like feeling like a pupil in Jo’s class. She crossed over to the bookcase.

“But whatever his name was,” Jo continued, “it’s obvious he doesn’t know where they are, or he wouldn’t have been calling here. I’m going to go and ring Andy. I won’t be long. He’ll know what to do. And I’ll try and get a notebook.”

With Jo gone, the flat went spookily quiet. Lily picked up the copy of
Hitler’s Children
from the bookcase. She opened the front cover and saw Fiona’s name and 1990 written on first page. Fiona always did that and Lily had teased her about it when they’d lived together. Teased her, while actually being secretly envious, that she could take herself, and her reading habits, so seriously. Lily flicked through the pages. As she did, a piece of paper fluttered out and she bent to pick it up. It was a ticket for the Metro being used as a bookmark. She slipped it back between the pages of the book, then sat down on the settee and started to read. She’d heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang, had even studied them as part of her European political theory course module, and she harboured some small hope that reading it might contain some clue as to her sister’s thoughts. She doubted it contained the answers to the questions she really wanted answering, like where the fuck was Fiona and how long was it going to take to find her, but she carried on reading just the same.

Lily lay on her back on the settee, smoking a cigarette, trying to ignore the voices in her head by forcing her attention onto
Hitler’s Children.
  She hadn’t finished the first chapter before Jo crashed through the front door.  Lily had years of experience of judging a person’s mood through their non-verbal communication. Her sense of unease increased with each footfall.

“He says the fact that Bruno came here isn’t a reason to cross him off the list,” said Jo, dropping her bag onto the kitchen floor.  Lily suspected she might have run up the four flights of stairs, judging from the beads of sweat on her forehead. “He said criminals often revisit the scene of the crime. He might have been-”

Lily sat up. The book slipped from her lap to the floor. “What do you mean, scene of the crime? What crime?”

“Well, say something bad has happened-”

“I don’t want to say something bad has happened.” Lily jumped up, knocking over the ashtray. “They’ve gone inter-railing. It’s obvious.”

“Alright, calm down.” Jo crossed the kitchen and stuck the kettle on. “You were the one that said it was weird that she’d left her coat and her diary.”

“Yeah, and you said it wasn’t.”

“That was before Bruno the pimp turned up.”

“He said he wasn’t a pimp.”

“Right. Well, obviously everything’s ok then.”

Lily kicked out at a chair leg. “Where the hell is she? She can’t have just disappeared.”

“Alright,” said Jo, “let’s stick to what we know is true.” She yanked a chair out and sat down at the wooden table, pulling a spiral bound notebook from her bag. She flicked over the cover page and ran the ball of her fist over the blank first page. On the top line she wrote, ‘Fiona’s last movements.’

Lily was looking over Jo’s shoulder. Her stomach turned. “Don’t write it like that. Makes it sound like she’s dead.”

“Or constipated,” said Jo, grinning. Lily wasn’t in the mood. She said nothing as she watched Jo write the word ‘known’ just above the gap between ‘last’ and ‘movements’.

Jo underlined the sentence twice and turned to face Lily, “Ok, so what do we know?”

“Fiona’s inter-railing,” said Lily, trying to inject as much certainty as she could muster into her voice.

Jo didn’t write anything in the notebook. “Stuart said she rang David. When was that?”

Lily lit another fag. Her hands were shaking. She tried to find a fingernail to chew but there was nothing on any of them. “I dunno. Not long before she went.”

“And what did she actually say?”

“Dunno.”

Jo pulled a face.

Lily tried to concentrate, to recall what Stuart had said. “Something about she was excited about getting a sun tan. He said to head south.”

Jo was writing out a timetable. “We need to know when that phone call was. Exactly what she said.”

“I could ring Stu.”

“Ok, so, we know she was round at the Beaumonts' on the Thursday night, collecting her wages.”  She wrote something in the book. “And we know she rang you Thursday night.”

 “Why didn’t I answer the fecking phone?”

“Because we were out, Lil.” Jo spoke in a voice that brooked no argument.

Lily knew she was right. Guilt wasn’t going to get them anywhere, but it was hard to let go. The guilt protected her almost. If she could carry on beating herself up about not answering the phone, she could perhaps avoid thinking about what it was that had made Fiona ring her in tears. “She must have told someone where she was going.”

“We should try Ruth.”

Lily shuddered at the thought of speaking to her sister’s mother. Ruth had always been extremely vocal about how she felt about Lily, and it wasn’t vocal in the sense of singing praises. “What about Grace? She might know something?”

“Who’s Grace?” Jo frowned then clicked her fingers. “Her friend from the diary. Yeah, she’ll be a good place to try. Maybe you could ask Stuart to ring Ruth.”

“Do you think they’ll keep records of train tickets?” asked Lily. “We could go down to the train station in the morning, see if anyone remembers.”

“We can, but it’s a long shot. First of all, there’s probably about twenty train stations in Paris and asking whether anyone remembers two girls buying tickets…”

“We need to get a photograph of them both.” Lily felt proud of her idea. She thought of the box in the wardrobe.

As if she was reading her thoughts, Jo said, “Andy says we should go through all her letters and stuff. See if there’s any clues.”

“Jesus, we’ve already read her diary and then let some guy steal it. She’s going to be so pissed off.”

“Not if she’s in some kind of trouble.”

“She hasn’t unpacked those boxes since she left the Beaumonts'. That was weeks ago. There’s not going to be anything in them.”

Jo stared at her, unrelenting.

“Ok, if we can’t find her mate tomorrow, we’ll go through everything in the boxes. Deal?”

Jo paused, her pen in hand for a moment. Then she seemed to let go of the point because she changed the subject. “Andy says we should start with the person who saw her last. That’s what the police would do.”

“There must be one around here somewhere.” Lily glanced around the kitchen, as if she might have missed seeing a photograph of her sister and Brigitte pinned to the walls.

Jo looked again at the notebook. “Which means Monsieur Beaumont.” She scribbled something else. “What do you think Nell was going to say about him?”

Lily’s brain was actually hurting. She had a dull throb in her frontal lobe.

Jo’s tone was impatient. “Nell was saying something about him just before Madame Beaumont swanned into the room.”

“If I was going away somewhere, I’d tell you,” said Lily.

And there was the problem, thought Lily. If she was going to be going inter-railing, she’d be going with Jo and she didn’t really have anyone else to tell. She might possibly tell her Aunt Edie, but quite why, she wasn’t sure. Aunt Edie would only purse her lips and come out with some xenophobic comment. Aunt Edie thought holidays meant Blackpool - Scarborough if you were feeling particularly adventurous. How much more excitement did a person need?

But Fiona had more friends than Lily, more family, more support. Surely. She could hardly have less. Lily looked across at Jo. “We need to find her mates. They’ll know where she is.”

“We could bang on some doors in the morning - speak to the neighbours.”

Jo had written ‘Suspect List’ at the top of a clean page and was busy writing names underneath. Lily read them over her shoulder. ‘Bruno (why steal diary?). Monsieur Beaumont (last to see her) Boyfriend.’

“What boyfriend?” asked Lily. “She didn’t have a boyfriend.”

“Andy says there’s another saying in the police. ‘Regardez le husband.’”

“She hasn’t got a husband.”

“Boyfriend, whatever. The unknown attacker, rapist, stalker is just a myth, invented by men to keep women small. Nine times out of ten it’s the man closest to them, the one that’s supposed to be protecting them from the myth of the random psychopath.”

Lily couldn’t help thinking that Jo was getting excited by the tasks that lay ahead. Lily wasn’t. She was just thinking about the impossibility of their task. Paris seemed enormous, overwhelming. Her words sounded petulant, even to her own ears, as she said again, “She hasn’t got a boyfriend.”

“Not that we know about.”

“She would have said.”

“What about that bit in her diary – where she said she’d asked Grace to set her up with someone. She said ‘I wonder what PS would make of that.’”

“Who’s PS?”

“That’s my point,” said Jo, sounding exasperated. Lily was having a hard time keeping up. “I’m wondering whether we should move in here.”

“Here?”

“Why not? It’s free. And we can smoke spliff. Hopefully the taste of soap will wear off.” Jo gestured at the bag of grass she had put to air on the radiator, even though the radiators weren’t on. “Besides we’re going to struggle to get a hotel at this time of night.”

“What if they come back?”

“Who?”

“Fiona and Brigitte.”

“That would be a good thing,” said Jo. “Surely?”

“They might be a bit pissed off that we’ve squatted the place.”

“Fiona’d better be pleased we’ve bothered to come and find her.”

Lily thought about it. “Suppose if any of their friends call round, at least we’ll be able to ask them questions.”

Jo scribbled ‘Things to Do’ at the top of a new page and wrote a list. “Find Grace. Box in Wardrobe. Photograph. Ticket Booking Offices?’” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Anything else?”

“Get Stuart to ring Ruth.”

Jo added it to the list before clicking the pen into the off position. She put the pen on top of the notebook and pushed it into the centre of the table. “I found a key, hanging on a hook next to the front door. So at least we can come and go as we please.”

“Good,” said Lily, not really listening. Her mind on other things.

 “It’s almost three,” said Jo. “We should try and get some sleep. Make an early start.”

Lily’s mind swam as she followed Jo out of the kitchen and into the bedroom on autopilot. It wasn’t forty eight hours since Stuart had first knocked on their door in Leeds. She’d had to cope with seeing Stuart again, learning her grandfather was dead, flying to Paris, meeting the Ice Queen, breaking and entering, Bruno. More had happened to Lily in the last two days, than usually happened in two months. Leeds felt like a lifetime ago.

“Which bed do you want?” asked Jo.

“Don’t care. Do you think we both better share Fi’s?”

“Do I think we both should share a single mattress and leave the double bed for the fairies? Er, let me think about this. No.”

“Actually, I think that’s Fiona’s,” said Lily, examining the sleeping bag that was rolled out on the double bed. “It is, look it’s got her girl-guide badges on it.”