by J.G. Ellis
Chapter Twenty-One
My mobile phone rang.
“Hi, Barbara.” Lisa Markham. “I’ll be at the hotel if you want to talk to me – or arrest me. Unless you’d rather meet somewhere else – not the police station, obviously.”
I said I’d come to the hotel. I imagined she was watching me as she made the phone-call; that she had waited for Andrea to leave before calling.
She met me in the foyer. I was struck by another dramatic change in her appearance. She was dressed in black shorts and a black tank-top, or vest, that left her midriff uncovered, and she had done her lips with black lipstick. Her hair was held back off her face with an Alice band of the same colour. She had painted her nails, fingers and toes – she was wearing Grecian sandals – with black nail polish or varnish. The first thing she said was “Come outside. I want to smoke.” I followed her outside and we sat at a white concrete picnic table, which stood on an expanse of lawn under a gazebo to the rear of the hotel. Notwithstanding the cover, the on-and-off rain meant we had it to ourselves.
I said, “You wanted to see me, Ms Markham.”
She said, “Oh, don’t lie. You were coming to see me anyway. And don’t call me Ms Markham.” She did something on her mobile phone and a young red-headed waitress came out and asked what she could get us. Lisa said, “I’ll have a large glass of red wine, and whatever she wants.” She said this without looking up from her phone. I wondered if she dressed to try out different personae, this being the sulky, spoilt adolescent.
“Ma’am?” The waitress.
“Coffee, please,” I said, though I’d much rather have had the red wine.
When the waitress had gone, Lisa lit a cigarette and said, “You must get lied to a lot.” She didn’t sound like she cared overly much.
“Yes,” I said. “All the time – often when I’m being told the truth.”
Lisa grinned and gazed into the distance. She was posing, of course, but then she was, and had, dressed for posing. I wondered if she were exploring who she was, or trying to find out who it was she was. It was also possible that I was being fanciful, that it was nothing more or less than a trivial fondness for clothes and dressing up. We grow used to what we see in the mirror, and it’s surely reasonable to want to subvert the familiarity from time to time, to shock or surprise the eye, particularly amongst the young. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, is that me I see at all?
The waitress returned with the wine and coffee on a round tray. She transferred them to the table and stood for a moment watching Lisa contemplate the wine. Finally, she said, “Shall I bring the bottle, ma’am?”
Lisa laughed and said, “Fuck off,” and the waitress, grinning, returned to the hotel.
I waited. I think I must have been numb. Certainly, I had lost all sense of urgency. Very little seemed important then, least of all the job I was supposed to be doing. Things were moving in sharp focus outside my bubble.
Lisa drank half the contents of her glass. “I fucked up,” she said. “So did you. You should have arrested Lorraine if you wanted to save her.”
I said, “And what should you have done?”
“What shouldn’t I have done? I shouldn’t have tried to save her from Adrian. She didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to sacrifice herself, immolate herself on the altar of his ideas. If we’d understood everything, we’d have tried to give her the strength to go through with it. Instead, we did what all privileged people do – assumed we knew better and best. Not just for us, but for her too. It’s awful to think Adrian might really have understood her and cared about her.”
“Who’s we?” I asked.
She dropped her gaze to the contents of her glass. “Me, then,” she said at length. “I, singular,” but I knew who we was, or some of we, and she knew I knew. Noblesse oblige or simple snobbery, she and Caroline had come to believe that Adrian shouldn’t be taking his brand of Promethean fire to the lower orders.
“Were you there, Lisa?” I asked.“I’m assuming you were.” I sipped the coffee. It was a little hot for comfort. “Why did you come into the police station to report someone missing you presumably knew was dead?”
“I didn’t know,” she said; “or, anyway, I wasn’t sure. I was trying to find out. I knew when I saw you.” She stubbed out her cigarette rather as if she regretted having smoked it. “It wasn’t a well-organised event,” she said. “No-one was sure what was going on. Everyone had their own agenda, their own reasons for being there – something to do being a major part of it. I was worried more about Lorraine than I was Adrian. None of this would have happened if he’d had the class to die quietly. It was vanity, of course. He wanted to make his death a big deal, and he’s certainly managed that.” She took a gulp of wine. “You want a neat, coherent narrative, don’t you?” she said reproachfully. “Something compelling to tell your shady friends in the press. And all you’ve got is a mess.” She grinned mischievously. “Life’s like that sometimes.”
“Lorraine told me she stabbed Adrian,” I said. “Was that just another story?”
“That’s what she told me too,” she said. “I didn’t see her do it. According to her, she was supposed to stab him and cremate him on the boat – all very Byron-Shelley. Thanks to you, I got the impression she might have killed him.”
“Do you know who took the pictures and videos?” I asked.
“Quite a few people I should imagine. All that mobile technology on the loose, and bright techno-literate young people to make use of it. I don’t know who they were. I can’t give you names, and I wouldn’t if I could. I’d expect you to think less of me if I did. I’m sure I didn’t know most of the people there anyway.”
“You know Caroline Meadows?” I said.
Lisa drained her wine histrionically. “I think Adrian might have mentioned her.” She tapped on her mobile phone again, and the red-headed waitress sashayed across the grass and – smiling pertly – put an open bottle of wine down on the table. She left without saying anything. “I may even have met her,” Lisa continued. “It’s possible. I meet lots of people.” She poured herself more wine. “Do you think Lorraine and Sharon are better off dead? I mean, they were broken and damaged and in pain. Presumably you wouldn’t deny that. All’s quiet now. The suffering has stopped. Suffering – it goes back generations in some cases, all the way back to when a master could amuse himself with his servant or slave with impunity and die with his reputation intact. It sickens the soul thinking about it. Adrian sent me this,” she said, reading from her phone: “How will it be come the end? I like to think it'll be cataclysmic, but that we'll have a bit of time to reflect on us. We won't be able to say we made the best of it, will we? – that we enriched the world, and made it a better place? Ours will be a legacy of selfishness and greed, like the killer after the bloodlust and mutilation, numb but never entirely sated – the rapist after the ejaculation, whiningly wishing he hadn't done it, and wretchedly baying to the sky for a better nature.” She sipped at her wine and lit another cigarette. “I think that about sums us up, don’t you?”
I stared at her without speaking, and must have seemed a little dazed, or dense. I heard a crow caw and the cooing of a wood pigeon.
Lisa, holding her wine glass in both hands, said, “Poor Barbara. Pity you can’t arrest misery.”
I said, “I don’t suppose you know who took the knife.” I had a choppy, badly cut film running in my mind of what might have happened: Death on the Lake. Adrian was the star with Lorraine as his leading lady. The rest of the cast changed with every run. It was relatively easy to cast Caroline as the person who’d hung the placard about his neck in an act of pre-emptive iconoclasm, and she had volunteered herself for the role. And it would also be easy to have her take the knife and dispose of it in a creative way, or perhaps – boldly – keep it as a souvenir. Perhaps it had lain for a cycle with the dishes in the Meadows’ domestic dishwasher.
Lisa said, “Whoever did, did it to protect Lorraine. I can volunteer if
you’re desperate. I could even argue I was trying to save his life.” A pause while she pensively sipped wine. “This isn’t going to turn ugly is it, Barbara?”
“Ugly?” I said.
“Oh, you know. Taking people in; different rooms; playing one off against the other; false confessions; he said she said he said. I understand the police can get quite desperate, what with everyone wanting a result these days. Is that what they want, Barbara? A result? I think you’re too good for that. In fact, I know you are.”
I drank coffee. I considered – in a fanciful way – emptying the cup and filling it with wine. I said, “I think you’ll find they’d rather it just went away, Lisa. We’ll be left with grief counselling to help the families and the wider community come to terms with the death of their young people – and bland pleas from career-minded politicians for the media to allow space for this necessary healing process. Blah blah. It’s the sound of a carpet being lifted and something unpleasant being swept under it.”
Lisa smiled. “You’re one of the good guys, Barbara.” She pushed a card across the table with various contact details on it. “Don’t feel you have to be investigating anything to get in touch.”
I took it and returned to the station, where I wrote a report for Superintendent Wilson – not one likely to gladden his heart. There was no baddie or culprit expeditiously apprehended following a briskly efficient, media-friendly investigation. No pictures of an arrestee in handcuffs, no post-arrest television interview for the Superintendent cast in the role of stoical public servant and community care-taker. Moral ambiguity is a bummer PR-wise. Pity you can't arrest misery.
I walked home, and, in the kitchen, filled a tumbler with red wine. I drank half of it in one go. The wine was excellent, the sensation better. I was thinking: I'm happy; we're happy. We've created our own happy death-defying illusion. Reality would, of course, chip away at it. Charm would be taken from us. Cats had died on me, and would die again. Age and infirmity would claim us, and interest and pleasure would be displaced by aches and pain and the struggle of mind and body in an increasingly hostile environment. And the dreary awfulness of loss, a quiet desolation the old must bear with uncomplaining fortitude. If it hurts too much, then get along and die. Maggie jumped up on the work surface, surprising me, and making me laugh. Unlike Barney, who could spot a landing like a gymnast, Maggie’s landings were like a badly controlled skid on ice. She was a big, wide-eyed, rabbity white tabby with a pink nose and large paws. I air-kissed and stroked her head. She closed her eyes and opened them slowly, approvingly.
I drained the wine and poured more. Why do people behave like life's going to go on forever? A symptom, I suppose, of escaping the truth of our demise. The grubby decline, the clinging onto the last scrap of the fire no matter how wretched the price? Quivering and demented in a chair, we missed the opportunity to make a dignified exit, to decide for ourselves, and laws and fear and indifference leave us grovellingly dribbling to an unseemly end.
Still for me/us, the happiness illusion still had, and has, a way to go, a while to run. I touched my nose to Maggie’s. I thought: maybe I'll try smoking in my sixties. Certainly, I thought, draining the tumbler again, I shall drink more. Probably a lot more. Indeed, why not drink myself to death – live then, anyway, as though tomorrow you're going to die?
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