This Thing of Darkness (68 page)

45

I’m not sensible.

Or rather: I don’t know what sensible looks like. What it would look like for me.

Here’s what I know:

• Two weeks ago I was tortured. I still can’t think about the episode, not in any detail. My mind leaps from it, like a finger withdrawing from a hotplate’s searing touch. Thanks to Lev and the dope and the romcoms, I haven’t yet collapsed, but I still don’t trust myself. My walls are paper and I can feel the coming storm.

• We haven’t found the Stonemonkey.

• I can’t get Watkins interested in ships, even though this whole damn case will stand or fall on our ability to get on board the right damn boat at the right damn time and with the right level of scary-as-shit police resources.

• I’m not right in my head.

• Watkins and Jackson can both see that I’m not right. They want me to see this psychologist in London. Take time off, sort myself out.

• And Glyn. What he said about Gina Jewell. The chronicle of a death foretold.

All those things, plus this: I keep losing my shoes.

A couple of times, I lost them at home. No big deal, just I noticed that shoes that had once been on my feet were now somewhere else. On the stairs, on a sofa, kicking around the kitchen floor.

Then, on the Saturday after my trip to Malmesbury, I decide to go into the office. Part of my rehab, knowing that work is one of the things that grounds me.

I spend the morning doing good things, useful things. Think I’m doing OK. Then I go out to get some lunch and happen to meet Bev in the lobby – she’d left a bag here, was coming in to pick it up.

We greet each other warmly – all that female bonding in the swimming lanes – but she adds, ‘Interesting fashion choice there, Fi.’

I look at what I’m wearing. Dark trousers. Pale top. Jacket. It isn’t interesting at all. Why I chose it.

I must look puzzled, I suppose, because Bev adds, ‘The bare feet look.’

I look down, more attentive this time. Stockinged toes where black leather pumps were meant to be. I say something, I don’t know what, but Bev doesn’t care anyway, knowing me for a muddle-headed idiot at the best of times.

She continues on her merry Bevian way. I chase back upstairs and scurry round after my shoes. Find one under my desk. Another in the kitchenette, propped up on the counter under a little handwritten Post-It that says,
Help Me!

I put the shoe on. Take the Post-It.

Sit down on the floor, in the mostly empty office, trying to feel my body, count my breaths, do any of those things that normally centre me.

No good.

Give up.

Go home.

Breathe.
In
-two-three-four-five.
Out
-two-three-four-five.

It doesn’t help, or doesn’t help much.

Remotely check Cesca Lockwood’s computer. Her emails. Facebook.

I know already that on Saturdays she, and a group of friends, often meet up for sushi and beers, before an evening out on the town. From what I can tell, today seems no exception. I wish I could hack into her phone, but although hacking those things is quite easy, I would need temporary possession of her phone to do it.

Ah well. That there are limits to my dark powers: a sad, regrettable truth.

Time passes. I’m not sure what happens in it. But at some stage the little green digits of the oven clock in the kitchen tells me it’s time to go.

Bag, keys, phone, coat.

Check my shoes – still there – and drive east.

46

King’s Cross.

Back streets. That yellow-brown London brick. Dug from pits in Haringey, baked in Middlesex. A Victorian London built on the labour of Victorian children.

Houses, offices, railway stations.

Those things and restaurants. Some glitzy. Aluminium tables and chairs grouped under green awnings. Plate glass windows opening onto clean linens and murmuring waiters.

My place isn’t like that. No awnings. No whispering glass.

I shove my car into a parking space. Try to read the signs, the ones that tell me whether it’s legal to park here or not.

I can’t work them out. They speak in some black and yellow language of their own. There’s a parking machine you can put coins in, though, so I put some coins in. The machine beeps. I wait a bit, but it doesn’t say anything else, so I go to the restaurant.

Sushi. Tempura.

I’ve never had either.

Cesca Lockwood is already there. With friends. It’s a warm evening. Lockwood is wearing a knitted cotton top. Loose weave. Nice. Dark hair, gathered at the back. She looks cool, the sort of cool that doesn’t have to try too hard.

Also, I notice, the kind of cool that isn’t dressed for a big evening of partying. Which is good. I didn’t want that.

I sit down at a table close to her. A Japanese waitress comes to me with a menu and asks me what I want.

I don’t know. The menu is full of things I don’t understand. I point at something. The waitress says something, speaking rapidly, communicating I don’t know what, but she finishes with smiles and nods, so I finish the same way too.

She goes.

Lockwood is staring at me. Maybe I’m staring at her.

I look away.

Lockwood’s gaze goes back to her friends. There’s a kind of intensity in the way she buries herself in their company. A digging in.

My food comes. A plastic tray with things on.

When I’m scattered like this, I can usually ground myself by spending time with dead people. Summoning their quiet presences and letting them calm my unruly one.

But which dead people? There are so many. I’ve liked my time with Moon and Livesey on this investigation, but now there’s Gina Jewell too, a woman whose face in death I haven’t seen, not even in photos.

And not just her, but me too. That woman sitting in an empty barn. That woman thinking,
Guys, I’m already freaked enough. Really very, very freaked
. The ragged little puppet who keeps falling apart and keeps being put back together, as her attentive torturer prepares the next little spritz of brine.

Those four – Moon, Livesey, Jewell and me – circle round. A corpse quadrille.

I’m not sure where to put my attention and it keeps sidling back to Lockwood, who sees me watching her.

I eat prawns with my fingers.

I think I look odd. I’m definitely feeling odd. I realise that Lockwood – Cesca – has a confusing presence, like she’s almost part of my little company of corpses.

I stare too much, too long, too obviously.

Some of her friends get up to go. Not her. She gets her bag, walks over to my table.

‘And you are?’ she says.

‘I’m Fiona. Fi.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘No. Not really.’

A pause. If you can call it a pause when she’s this busy assessing me.

‘You’re being really weird.’

‘Sorry. It’s my fault.’ I get out my warrant card. Show it. Meaning actually properly show-it-so-she-can-read-it, not just flash a wallet at her. Once she’s had a chance to look, I say, ‘I worked on the break-in down at your mother’s house, Plas Du. I was one of the people who charged your father with perverting the course of justice. The main one, in a way. I mean, I’m very junior but it was me who pushed the whole thing.’

One of her friends is lingering by the door. Wanting to go, but checking that Cesca is OK with the weirdo. There’s an exchange of glances, which ends up with the friend leaving.

Cesca sits opposite me.

‘You’re the one who’s sending my dad to jail?’

‘Not me, the courts. But, yes, basically.’

‘And you’ve come here to do what?’

‘Um. See you. Talk.’ Pause. ‘Look, I know you don’t get on with your dad. I know you don’t see him.’

Her face pushes a question at me. I tell her that I can track her car and his and that they’ve never been in the same place. ‘And I know you changed your name. And your brother, Ollie, told me he is a bit of a dick.’

‘He’s a total dick, not a bit of one.’

‘I also know that your dad gives you four thousand pounds a month and that you give it away. Every month.’

Cesca looks furious, but also upset. It’s a face we see a lot when interrogating people. It’s like the first sight of prison bars: a dawning understanding that life, sometimes, has hard limits.

I like that face usually. The sign of an interrogation going well. But it’s not something I can handle now. That face feels too like my face. My face as it was on that chair, in that barn.

I try – clumsily – to soften things.

‘No one else knows. I mean, it wasn’t a police thing.’

‘If it wasn’t police, what was it?’

‘Cesca, can we go back to your flat? I’ll tell you everything. You can choose what to tell me. If you want, you can tell me nothing at all.’

My warrant card is still sitting on the table. She picks it up again and studies it. Trying to see if it’s a forgery, I think.

I say, ‘I
am
police. I’m not all that normal in my head, so if I come across as a bit strange right now, that’s because I am. You wanted to know how I knew about the money. The answer is that I burgled your flat. Not physically me, but a friend.’

‘That time in the café? At college?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were there, like, watching me?’

‘Yes. While my friend burgled your flat.’

‘I could have you fired.’ There are tears in her eyes. Angry ones.

‘You could have me prosecuted. Fired, prosecuted, jailed. You’d be well within your rights.’

‘You want to talk?’

‘Yes.’

That angry flare again. But something decisive too. A rapid movement of the chin. ‘And you’ll leave if I tell you to?’

‘Yes.’

She turns for the door. I know I have to pay, but I don’t know how much. I just show my money to the waitress, and let her take what she needs.

Cesca and I walk to the Tube station.

Get a train heading north to Seven Sisters. Light alternating with darkness. Stations and tunnels. Adverts telling me about the thousand different selves I could be. Prettier, taller, saner, cooler.

Livesey, Moon, Jewell and that girl in the barn gallop through the tunnels with us. Skittering on the rails. Chattering in the cables. Howling in the dark space between carriages.

Cesca and I try talking but it doesn’t really work, so she just plays with her silver jewellery and I watch for corpses in the flashing window reflections. In my bag, I still have the yellow Post-It that says
Help Me!
I keep my bag half-open on my lap, so I can see the note.

The train gets us to wherever we need to be.

We get out. Start ascending an escalator. From the bowels beneath us, a warm wind blows.

Cesca says, ‘Where are your shoes?’

I stare at her. Then at my feet.

Tights yes. Shoes no.

I say I don’t know where they are. When I lost them.

Whisper, ‘Sorry.’

Sorry for being a crazy policewoman. Sorry for losing my shoes and burgling her flat. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

We get to her place. Her flatmate isn’t there. Cesca makes herbal tea.

Her bedroom feels darker, more intimate than it did from Penry’s photos. There’s an overhead light, but Cesca turns on only a single heavily shaded sidelamp. A double bed, a small one. A long aubergine dress hangs from the side of a wardrobe. Art posters. A corkboard with photos and postcards. From a dressing table, the glitter of jewellery and make-up.

I put my hand to her desk drawer. Say, ‘Do you mind if we smoke?’

She says, ‘Smoke?’

I get out her hippy-dippy Indian box. ‘I should have brought my own. Sorry.’

I start a roll-up.

She covers her hand with her mouth as she watches. Then goes into her kitchen and calls someone from there. I think she’s speaking to her mother. Trying to see if I really am a police officer. Something her mother says persuades her that I am.

She rings off. Comes back in to the room, sits on the bed. Accepts a puff or two from the joint. Sips her tea.

Starts laughing. Not mostly because of the dope. I think she’s partly laughing at me, partly just a release of nervous tension.

I smile back.

The dope is settling me a bit. Either that, or somehow my corpses and me are coming into line. Like the place they are and the place I am start to fit together better.

‘This thing with my dad. Is he really going to go to jail?’

‘I think so, yes. If his lawyers are smart, they’ll look at the evidence, persuade him to plead guilty, and I’d say he’ll probably get a year, no more. Serve a few months. Open prison.’

‘So not that bad then?’

‘Not bad enough.’ I smoke more. Finish the joint. ‘Look. He’s your dad. And I meant what I said. If you ask me to leave, I will. I won’t enter your flat or your life again. Won’t get someone else to do it. I’ll be good as gold.’

‘OK.’

‘And I don’t know how much of the detail you know. But basically your dad lied to cover up an insurance scam – a scam where he wasn’t the perpetrator. On the other hand, it was a big scam and a persistent lie. He deserves punishment, no question, but he’ll tell the world he didn’t do anything wrong. That he was just trying to prevent a crime.’

‘And you don’t believe that.’

She didn’t really say that like a question. More a prompt. She hasn’t, I notice, given me any real steer on where she stands in relation to her father. He’s a ‘total dick’, yes, but that phrase could conceal anything from weary disdain to cold, hard fury.

I say, ‘No, no, I don’t. I think he’s up to much worse things. I think he’s capable of extreme violence.’

Extreme violence: I certainly suspect Evans of ordering the Livesey and Moon murders, but that’s not really what I had in mind. Evans spoke of Idris Gawr as an investment fund run ‘by a small group of us, quite active.’ I think Evans is the front man. The Voice is one of his close associates. Whichever one of them ordered the torture on me, Evans was as complicit as if he himself had been holding the picana.

My fingers are rolling another joint. I apologise yet again. ‘Sorry. I’ve had a really hard time recently. I’m off work.’

I light up again but, oddly, simply acknowledging the violence has helped to settle me. As though it’s better to have the stink of those electrical burns in the room than hovering just outside.

‘Our evidence is pretty scanty,’ I continue. ‘Nothing we could place in front of a court. But I saw evidence – real data, legitimately gathered – suggesting that you and your dad didn’t get on, so I came to have a look.’

Cesca speaks at last, her mind made up about something. ‘I don’t know anything about violence. Not the sort you mean, anyway.’

‘But . . .?’

‘He screwed a friend of mine. She was fifteen, quite messed up. I mean, she was messed up beforehand. Afterwards . . .’ She shrugs.

‘Go on.’

‘Jazz MacClure. That was her name. Jacinta, Jazz. She got into a thing with my dad. Totally consensual, except for the fact that she was underage and there was a thirty-five-year age gap.’

I nod. We’d never take action against a seventeen-year-old boy having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, but we’d never ignore underage sex when there was such a massive disparity between the ages.

Cesca says, ‘My dad did his stuff. Money. Private jets. Fancy parties. I mean, when he wants to be nice to people, he can really turn it on.’

‘I know. He tried with me, sort of.’

‘He’s compulsive. He thinks it’s some proof of manliness, the younger they are. Anyway, there came a point where Jazz wanted out. She’d somehow persuaded herself that this was a love thing, the real deal, then found he wasn’t even being faithful to her.’

‘Surprise, surprise.’

‘She started to talk to friends again. Realised she’d been exploited. Sent a few angry texts or emails, whatever, to him, accusing him of stuff. Talked about going to the police. Not that she would have done. It was just venting.’

‘She
should
have done, you know. We treat those things better than we used to.’

Cesca lets my remark go. I shouldn’t have said anything. She was on a roll. She finds her train of thought again and says, ‘He came to the school. Said he’d been friends with this girl, yes, but no sex, nothing like that. Then realised she’d become infatuated. Angry and vengeful when he tried to step away. Told the school she had a drug problem, which she
totally
didn’t. I mean . . .’

‘Dope yes, harder stuff no. And the dope under control,’ I suggest. ‘If that’s a drug problem, then I’ve got a bad one.’

Cesca laughs. ‘Actually . . .’ she says, and laughs at me. I laugh too and wiggle my toes in my tights.

‘They looked in her room. Found some coke. Also a tiny bit of heroin. Some drugs and needles that had been nicked from the school matron’s office. A bundle of cash whose presence she couldn’t explain. They expelled her. She had problems at home anyway and things got worse.’

‘Yes?’

‘A few months later, she attempted suicide. A year and a bit later, she actually did it. I mean, my dad wasn’t there. He didn’t make her do it. It
was
her choice and she
was
messed up, but still. Fucker.’

‘Yes.’

Cesca gets up. Goes over to the corkboard, and its mess of photos and postcards. She picks a photo off the board and hands it over. Jazz MacClure, with a wineglass in her hand, laughing at someone or something out of sight. Long, dark-blond hair. A maroon top with a beaded collar. Pretty, in a windswept way. A picture overshadowed by the knowledge of what came after.