Ventriloquists (29 page)

‘It’s nice to see you again, Bernadette,’ he said with his eyelids still down. He sniffed the air and opened his eyes. ‘And welcome to your friends.’ He unhooked his ankle and floated upright.

‘You’re gonna do yourself a mischief, son,’ said Massimo.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Connors whispered.

Experiencing a tightness in her back – possibly a result of the almost-tumble that she’d taken – Bernadette prevented herself from being too amazed. Sure, the kid did something like yoga and could elevate. Big deal. Had
he
every known a patient who worked as a ventriloquist, who could make his voice emerge from his own penis? No, he hadn’t (most likely); but Bernadette had. She had also nursed a man with a saxophone reed embedded in his rectum. Bizarre things happened all over, and she would have to keep an open mind as to what might be commonplace in these parts.

Connors said again, ‘I don’t believe it,’ at a normal volume this time.

‘I’d like to ask you about the man who brings the lizards,’ said Massimo.

‘Can it be
you?
’ said Connors.

Massimo and Bernadette regarded their colleague; the boy’s eyes were bright, his expression now mildly quizzical.

‘It
is
you, isn’t it?’

‘Chris?’ said Massimo, his tone concerned.

‘This is the boy I told you about,’ Connors replied, excited. ‘When I first got here! I thought you were dead! I saw you eaten… by those flies…’

Atchoo smiled.

Connors stepped forward, arms wide.

Copying the gesture, the boy hovered half a metre off the ground and wafted backwards, in the direction of his snow-and-wood dwelling.

This action stopped Connors where he stood.

Atchoo stepped down off the air and also stood still, a full two metres back from where he’d been a second earlier. The clear message was: keep your distance.

‘Elvis?’ Connors pleaded.

‘My name’s Atchoo.’

‘But you…’

Massimo took hold of Connors’s right arm. ‘It’s just a coincidence, mate,’ he said. ‘They just look the same.’

‘No. No they
don’t
look the same. Or sound the same,’ Connors argued. ‘But it’s him. I swear it is.’

‘He says not,’ said Bernadette.

‘Who was Elvis?’ the boy enquired.

Surprising everyone, Connors started to cry. The alteration about him was dramatic: from one second, cock of the walk, almost a lord of the manor; to the next, a blubbering wreck, fallen to his haunches, his arms folded over his head, in as near to the foetal position as was possible while his feet stayed on the ground.

‘His son?’ the boy persisted.

Nobody knew what to say – or do.

A long time passed before the boy invited the three of them inside his home.

Number 77 (and the Camp)

1.

Yasser pushed the button and heard ‘Greensleeves’ from within the house. A light came on in the hallway. The door opened with a great hurried tug.

The man who answered had a half-clean air about him; the air of someone feverish, someone who hadn’t slept much in the last few nights. Dressed only in a dressing gown, he was scruffy about the face and hair, with a ratty expression and an exudation of stale wine b.o.

‘Thought you might be Bernadette,’ the man said. ‘Lost her keys.’

‘Are you Chris?’

The man nodded. ‘And you are?’

‘Yasser. You were at a card game three nights ago. You won handsomely.’

‘So-so. A hundred up. Are you a copper?’

‘No. I’m a detective, though. Sort of.’

‘Yeah?’ The sentence seemed to cheer Chris up. ‘Like the
Scooby Doo
kids. Your age, I mean. What is it you want exactly? It’s cold.’

‘To talk about the game.’

‘…Well, what about it?’

Yasser plunged. ‘How well do you know Tommy?’ he asked.

‘Well as anyone on the circuit, I suppose. Played him a few times.’

‘Successfully?’

Chris shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some… Look, it’s getting colder, I think, and I’m a bit worried about my partner; so if you could arrive at your point I’d be grateful.’

‘He lives not ten minutes from here,’ said Yasser.

‘Tommy? So what if he does?’

‘So I wonder if you know him outside the occasional game.’

Chris grimaced. ‘As a detective, son, you’re getting close to having your face filled. Just what is it you’re insinuating? If anything at all.’

Yasser stood his ground. He was halfway of the opinion that he hadn’t a lot to lose. Unlike the students…

‘The students lost a lot. You two won a lot,’ he summarised.

‘So what? You don’t send a boy to do a man’s job. It was a game.’

‘You sharked them.’

‘Now you’re the gambling police? We sharked them: what does that even mean?’

‘It means you paired up to fleece them. Split the winnings afterwards.’

‘Is that right. Well okay, son, you’ve had your say. But I’d like to remind you, in the absence of clearly defined rules of engagement, what we did was no different from the genius mong who counts cards. Okay? It’s how I earn a living. And if a blur the lines occasionally, it’s between me and my conscience. So
if
you’d excuse me…’

Glass broke, somewhere behind the resident. Balletically he span. As he headed off along his hallway, Yasser hissed in a breath… and followed him in. If Chris found Shyleen in his kitchen – the most likely place where she would have broken glass accidentally – there was no telling what he might do. It’s a man’s right to protect his property from intruders.

This flashed through Yasser’s mind; and if he hadn’t been unsure enough of Shyleen’s plan to gain entrance to Chris’s house by the back way before, he was now. She had obviously managed to get
in.
(She had guessed that a back door would be open; maybe she’d been right – Yasser couldn’t imagine her climbing through the utility room window.) Only clumsiness had let her down.

Chris stormed into the dining room, Yasser a few strides behind. The patio doors were open, and the parquet floor was sprinkled with the shards and contents of a broken white vase that must have stood in front of them. So… Shyleen had tried the doors, knocked the vase over… and run away?

She was not in the room, Yasser noted with relief. Even if she’d only got as far as a retreat to the garden shed, she was out of harm’s way for the moment. Yasser stood on the threshold between the hall and the dining room; his heart told him that he should contemplate a retreat of his own.

A gust of chilly air from the garden, and Chris seemed to wake up. The flowers scattered at his feet, as if as an act of devotion, were not as engaging as Yasser’s presence was.

‘I don’t remember inviting you into my home,’ the man stated.

‘It’s about a missing child,’ said Yasser – the time for deftness or subtlety had surely passed.

Chris cocked his head. ‘Is this
your
doing?’ he snapped.

‘How could it be? The wind must’ve caught the doors. Stranger things happen at sea.’

Yasser could tell that Chris remained unconvinced (and reasonably unimpressed)… but there was a flicker or two of something on his features. Was it doubt? Suspicion? The reflexive spasm of concern produced by anyone hearing the words
missing child?

Crunching pieces of vase underfoot, Chris stepped out onto the patio. Yasser watched him take a look around, then he entered the dining room again.

‘What missing child?’ he asked.

‘Her mother’s name is Maggie Earl. She lives near Tommy on the Travellers’ site.’

‘Hang on. How did you find me anyway?’

‘One of the students on the ground floor,’ Yasser answered. ‘Likes to think of himself as Mr Security; keeps a record of licence plate numbers of all the vehicles that visit. There were only four unfamiliar numbers on the night of the game. Two of the cars belong to women. One was Tommy’s truck. One was yours… I got lucky. I traced your address through your car insurance.’

Chris exhaled. ‘Fuck me. I underestimated you, son, but I’m going to disappoint you now. I don’t know any Maggie. And I definitely don’t know nothing about a missing child. What do you take me for, son? I’m a gambler, pure and simple.’

‘I’m starting to believe you,’ said Yasser.

‘How blessed I feel. Now if you’d kindly vacate my premises… I have to make some calls, see if I can find my partner.’

‘She’s missing too?’

Chris closed the patio doors. With a long stride he attempted to hurdle the wreckage on the floor; he moved into a brightly-illuminated kitchen. ‘Yeah, she’s missing too,’ he admitted.

Perhaps he was going for a dustpan and brush. ‘How long?’ Yasser asked.

‘One night.’

Yasser followed as far as the threshold between the rooms. In for a penny, he decided.

‘Did you argue?’

‘That’s none of your business, son.’
Chris reached for a shelf above the stove and pulled down the chinaware container in the shape of a cute pig. He removed the pig’s head, took out some keys on a leather band, and strode back towards the dining room.

Stepping out of his way, Yasser asked, ‘Did you call the police?’

‘I don’t do police,’ Chris answered on automatic.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Bernadette.’

For a fraction of a second, before he’d completed the first syllable, Yasser had expected him to say
Bid
or
Bridget –
the name of Maggie’s cousin. How beautifully neat that would have been! If all roads led back to Maggie somehow; and if the two women were messing with this guy’s mind as well… How beautifully
neat
.

The name Bernadette, however, meant nothing to Yasser. If there’d ever been a square one, he was back there now.

Retreat with dignity, he decided. It was time to find Shyleen; time to give up for the night. He was tired.

While Chris was locking the patio doors, Yasser’s phone beeped. Yasser was back in the hall, on his way to the front door. He thumbed the keys: it was a text from Shyleen.

‘Let me know,’ Yasser added as an afterthought, ‘if she doesn’t show up. Finding people’s my business, Chris.’

The man turned, a smile on his face. ‘A business pitch?’ he asked.

‘Opportunity knocks but once.’

Yasser thumbed open Shyleen’s message.

‘What are your rates?’ Chris wanted to know. ‘Out of curiosity, like.’

‘Oh I’m reasonable. But I should go.’

The front door had not been closed; Yasser stepped out. His heartrate had increased.

‘At least leave a card,’ said Chris, still standing at the patio doors.

‘I don’t have one.’ Yasser pointed at a notepad by the phone. ‘Can I write my number?’

‘Please do.’

Yasser’s hand shook as he printed his contact details on the pad’s top page.

Shyleen’s message had been simple but chilling.
I’m in the house,
it had said.

2.

It wasn’t an accident – wind pulling at the patio door, for example – that had broken Chris’s vase. No. Shyleen had broken it on purpose. She had heard but a snatch of the trouble that Yasser was having at the front door, so she’d picked up the vase – not intending to smash it so
thoroughly
, granted, but intending to break it
a bit
– and she’d done the business.

Then she’d skipped through the kitchen, to hide.

Several years earlier, Shyleen had had a friend who lived in this village: a girl called Amanda Cleveland. Although Shyleen had envied the girl her ledge of bust and her pony, they’d bonded because of a mutual (but as it turned out for both of them, fleeting) fascination with Amateur Dramatics. Once a week, after school (different schools), they attended an AmDram group in a church hall in Dunstable, pretending to be a sandwich – to
get into the character
of a sandwich – or playacting Eugene O’Neill for laughs, depend on the caprice of their Group Leader, whose first name, oddly, was Chamber. As a result of this term-long friendship, Shyleen had been invited to Amanda’s house. She had got to know the layout well.

The house that she was in now had the same layout.

Shyleen had tiptoed through the kitchen, smelling faintly – very faintly – cigarette smoke in the air. This aroma made her intuit that Chris took his fag breaks outside – he certainly didn’t smoke in the house – and if he was anything like her father, he didn’t bother to lock doors to the outside until bedtime. Sure enough, the door was unlocked; in fact, it had been left ajar. So Shyleen had crept into the utility room.

It was a tight fit. And the disguise would not survive any serious examination. But Shyleen had curled herself up and wedged herself into a small space between the end of the sink unit and the room’s far wall. From the door she would not be seen; but if Chris came into the room…? To use the tumble drier? The washing machine? Or to reach into the cupboard for some shoe polish or toilet detergent? It would be finished.

Peculiar as it was, however, Shyleen felt no fear. She was not afraid of being discovered, and the absence of emotion made her query her mental condition. Surely it wasn’t normal to feel fine as an uninvited stranger in someone’s house…

Scrunching herself tighter into the hole, she fiddled with her phone and sent Yasser the message that she was in the house. She made certain that her phone was set to silent and no-vibrate, and then she tried to prepare herself for a long wait. However, after seconds – no, it must have been minutes – she began to feel both bored and cramped.

Call Yasser?

No, not yet; what would she say anyway?
I’m still in the house?
Waste of a call – or a text. And besides, she wanted to remain sharp: if not observant then tuned in, alive to the house owner’s every movement – every squeak, fart… every phone call. If she concentrated on her own business, how would she keep tabs on Chris’s?

The screen lit up. HOME, it said.

Bismillah!

Shyleen felt her shoulder muscles clutch together; immediately her scalp beat with a fresh temperature. The fact that she couldn’t hear the phone ring made it worse; it was an age before the answering service picked up, with Shyleen weighing up how she would explain a missed call to her parents – especially to Papa. A missed call was as bad as a confession of lesbianism, more or less.

3.

Yasser waited until his boredom had turned panicky; then he started the car engine, engaged first gear, and swerved a long glance across the length of the empty park. In his head he had set the whole stretch – the grass, the swings, the slide – alight, in a blaze of petrol-ignited fire. Why? Because he was that pissed off, that was why. Pissed off with Chris and with Shyleen.

Fuck this noise,
he breathed.
She can wait.

He was referring to his cousin, but he was not being mean-spirited. As far as Yasser knew, Shyleen had sneaked into Chris’s house, and now she was not answering texts. Having got it into his head that Shyleen would be all right for another half-hour if she had survived this far, he pulled away out of the car park with his credit card throbbing in his wallet like a badger’s heart.

At the station he bought ten quid’s worth of petrol in a green can meant for lawnmower engines. And a lighter. With a head crammed with rage he crossed the forecourt and got back in.

Then he drove the five minutes to the camp, all the time part-believing that he was in a pantomime.
He’s behind you!
All the time waiting to be caught out; to be pinched; to be
rumbled.

Yasser was buoyed up by indignation. First he wanted some answers from Maggie, and then he was going to burn down her caravan.

And the Brazilian’s.

4.

When Shyleen stood up in the utility room, her joints clicked with gratitude and her spine stretched like a cat’s. She felt like she’d been sitting in the same position for half a year, and it was good to move. She checked her phone for the time (the light illuminated the small room drowsily, lending it the appearance of a Cornish cave) and she was surprised that it was nearly midnight. Now that she felt restless and in need of something to do, the reality of hour growing late spurred her mind on. Iin fact, it raced… but it wouldn’t settle. One of the very real flaws in her and Yasser’s strategy to get into Chris’s house had long since become clear: they had no idea of what they were doing or what they were looking for. So she checked her phone for messages, intending to ignore the discomfort in her bladder, and again read 4 MISSED CALLS. Probably Mum or Dad, Shyleen reasoned; Yasser would know better than to ring. She opened her texts.