The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  ‘This is a rose one. Rose something.’ Belle was performing, her attention still on the door. Veronica could hear Dane moving about on a wooden floor.

  ‘Oh, yes. Thank you so much.’ Veronica took the offered jar and smelt it. Another scent from her childhood, chemist-shop Yardley. She put the lid back on and put it in her bag.

  ‘Some of them are in coloured jars,’ said Belle. ‘There’s a patchouli one, too. I’ve got most of them at home.’

  Veronica was looking down at the child. The little boy looked very clean. The bruise on his forehead had already faded. His left arm, where Treen had shown her the marks, was hidden by a sleeve. He didn’t seem distressed in any way. Despite the apparent discomfort of his position, he was soundly asleep. Veronica remembered what she had heard when she had come in. Have you given him one of your things?

  It was hard to tell whether or not the boy’s colour was healthy. Up here, closer to the cloudy front window, the light was a dull grey. The corners gave off that old-building smell, dust and damp and peeling lead paint.

  ‘This is a label,’ said Belle sharply, holding out a small square of paper. ‘You can peel off the back and stick it on the jar or just keep it. It’s got the phone number. Or I might see you at the market if you like.’ She took a step towards the front door, anxious for Veronica to be gone.

  Veronica said, ‘This child –’

  ‘It’s Treen’s. Mayson. With a y. He’s all right now.’ Another step. ‘All right?’ He had been hospitalised. In March, only four months ago.

  ‘You have to go.’

  It was time to ask questions. ‘I’m looking for my son. His name is Roland Cruikshank.’

  Belle’s face stiffened. For a moment her stare was so blank it made Veronica think of Treen, frozen on the mountain. Belle took another step towards the front of the room.

  ‘Roland knew her. Your poor friend Treen.’ Veronica allowed only a small softening here and hurried on. ‘And I’m very sorry about what happened, but I think Roland’s in trouble and I can’t find him. He stuck a drawing of Treen on your window, last night or this morning. I wonder if you saw him. If you can tell me where he might be?’

  There was a thick silence. Behind the back door, Veronica heard another step, stealthy and slow. Or maybe she imagined it.

  Belle said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Her voice was raised to reach the open door. ‘He better not come anywhere near us. You tell him that if you find him.’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘Treen’s gone now. Tell him to stay away.’

  ‘Belle, I’m so sorry about what happened to your friend. I am. So sorry. But I’m not quite clear. Do you know where Roland is?’ Belle smiled. A mean smile, small teeth. The eyes full of fear. ‘Tell him we’ll say.’

  ‘I will tell him. I would give him any message you like, if I could find him.’

  She sneered at the cleverness. ‘Treen went three days ago. I could say I saw what she drove away in, that’s all.’

  ‘Where? To the mountain? Did you see a car?’

  ‘I might have. I might have seen a blue car. A small car, mauvy blue.’

  ‘It wasn’t Roland who took her to the mountain, if that’s what –’ ‘Here’s your sample. That’s all you’re getting.’ She took Veronica by the arm and pulled her towards the door. ‘Don’t come to the market. Roland’s friends aren’t welcome anywhere near us.’

  Then, as she pulled the door open, under the cover of the grinding sound, she added, ‘Someone is coming.’

  It had been so quick, and so offhand, that at first Veronica thought she was talking about someone on the footpath, alerting her to a possible collision. But there was no-one there. The door closed and she found herself standing in the street, trying to work out if she had heard it properly. What else might the girl have said? She stared at the grimy glass in the door, and then looked around the shops of New Town Road, trying to work out what Belle could possibly have meant and thinking of the sleeping child in the grey air, and the girl’s awful, dull skin and her thin voice and the calculating, panicked look in her eyes.

  Chapter 13

  ______

  Before she started the car she sat, staring at the street in front of her, trying to understand what had happened in the shop. A small car, mauvy blue … Tell him we’ll say. It wasn’t possible, of course, that Roland had driven Treen up the mountain and left her there to die. Veronica wouldn’t – couldn’t – believe that. But she did need to think this through.

  Her phone was ringing. Georgie, calling in her lunch hour. She couldn’t involve Georgie in this. She ignored it.

  Somewhere there must be an order. If she’d been a different person, the person her mother had wanted her to be, the person her children needed, she would have found it. But as it was, she had only disparate images and events, odd moments and single unconnected ideas. The Slipping Place, a frozen foot, Silas Marner, Treen protesting about a photograph, allowing it to be taken, Judith throwing a book at a barman, Woe to the mother’s son, a drawing of a girl called Molly. A young child with blood in his eyes. Mayson with a y. Someone is coming. Silent.

  Now there was a text message:

  Fri, 22 Jul 12.04 pm

  Mum Tom said Dad’s got an apartment near the Theatre Royal so thanks for telling me. But oh well. Better off without him I say.

  I’ve been asking everyone about Roland. No-one knows where he is. Tom and Libby say Roland is a dick.

  Then another:

  Fri, 22 Jul 12.06 pm

  But Miriam and Britta say you should let me help you. I am part of this family too. I am coming around after work.

  And finally:

  Fri, 22 Jul 12.07 pm

  Libby told me something about Roland and Paul. It might be important. It’s about Paul copying everything Roland does.

  I have a thing I can’t get out of. I’ll come tomorrow.

  Veronica put the phone down. She wasn’t capable of dealing with Georgie right now. She had to decide what to do next.

  There was no discernible pattern. Yet. All she could do was stick to her original plan. Lesley hadn’t known anything useful. Belle hadn’t led her to Roland.

  Now she would talk to Paul.

  She pulled up outside the gallery at half past twelve, in the same parking space as before, suppressing the panicky thought that she was going around in circles. Illumin was well named. Even with the sun higher, the alley was a cold place, and the window was a warm yellow rectangle, inviting.

  There were three customers in the gallery, murmuring quietly, looking at a shelf of silver bowls. Vicky was at the counter, but she wasn’t serving. John had come down from the offices and he was standing facing her, the good hand and the hand in the splint raised.

  He was arranging a scarf around her neck. Veronica would never have picked the urbane John as a likely friend for Vicky, but they stood with their heads tipped together, laughing like siblings. As Veronica came in, they turned. Vicky gave John a push and he went out through a low door.

  ‘Hello, Veronica.’ The scarf was one from the gallery – screen-printed silk, gorgeous. John had left it loose and graceful across her chest. Above it a heavy, friendly face. ‘Are you looking for Roland? He was here.’ Vicky came towards her with a sympathetic smile. ‘He stuck some of his drawings on the front window. Before we opened. No-one saw him.’

  ‘Drawings? Plural?’

  ‘Four. Lesley took them down.’

  Veronica looked vaguely at the window. There hadn’t been anything there when she had sat in the car with Lesley, less than two hours ago. He had been here since then. And Lesley had come back from the coffee roasters and removed them.

  ‘He’s a rum’un.’ Vicky laughed, more concerned with Roland’s behaviour than with what the pictures might mean. ‘If I’d seen him, I would’ve told him to ring you. I know you want to catch up with him.’

  ‘I’m going up.’

  Veronica took a step but Vicky got in th
e way again. This time, instead of leading the way, she stood with her back to the stairs. ‘There’s no-one here. Just John and me. Paul’s in Deloraine, talking to a wood carver, and Lesley’s gone out to meet Roland. In the Coal Valley.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He rang and asked her to go out there. She wrote down the address.’ Vicky went to the counter. ‘She put it into her Google Maps and left the written version.’ She picked up a notepad and held it out. ‘She didn’t say not to tell you.’ An uncomplicated person who dealt in facts, instructions, simple actions. A person who didn’t question things.

  Veronica looked at the address: 119 Reeve Street. ‘Campania?’ ‘Roland’s visiting the parents of the dead girl. He asked Lesley to go and meet him there. There’s something he wants to tell her. She tried to make him ring you, but he wouldn’t, so she agreed to drive out there. She was pretty annoyed.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  Vicky shrugged. ‘Ten minutes?’

  Veronica could catch up with them. When she was face to face with Roland she would be able to make him see sense.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She was struck again by the incongruity – someone like Vicky, the simple soul, among these polished shelves, draped in silk, giggling with John.

  Before she left, she couldn’t help asking, ‘Who are you?’

  Vicky gave her another warm smile, full cheeks pushing up into small eyes. ‘I told you. I’m a friend.’

  Chapter 14

  ______

  Veronica had to concentrate to stay within the speed limit. She couldn’t afford to be pulled over. Besides, she told herself, she wouldn’t gain any significant amount of time by driving fast. Campania was only half an hour away. She turned north off the airport freeway, drove through Cambridge and past vineyards and cherry orchards. The address was on the main road, on the far side of the little town. As she approached it, a Jeep-type vehicle came towards her, pumping black smoke, and when it had passed she could see Lesley standing beside her car on the other side of the road.

  Veronica parked outside 119, a cream brick house, low and lightly built, a box sitting on a bare lawn. There was no sign of movement there.

  She got out of the car and crossed the road. ‘Is he here? Is he inside?’

  Lesley was looking back down the road towards the town. ‘He’s gone.’ She nodded. The four-wheel drive had disappeared around a corner, leaving a grey cloud and a faint gritty smell.

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Lesley looked distracted. ‘He came out here with Treen’s father this morning. He rang me and asked me to come and meet him, but when I got here, only five minutes ago, he came running out and suddenly he was in a screaming hurry. I wasn’t invited inside. He said he could only give me a few minutes, while he was waiting for Mr McShane to get himself ready.’

  Everywhere Veronica went, Roland’s behaviour was described to her. He had become a story, present in her life only as absence. Suddenly she felt the fatigue from the tense drive, the long morning, the sleepless night. Her face felt numb. She put a hand on each cheek, massaging, rubbing outwards towards her ears.

  Lesley said, ‘Honestly, he was behaving as if the police were going to come charging along any minute. He said he had to keep moving. Now they’ve gone off to visit the sister in Mount Stuart. Not to her house, to meet in a café, because obviously the police will be waiting at her place too. Anyone would think he was some enormous criminal mastermind.’ Lesley made a sound that she intended to be a laugh. She looked as tired as Veronica felt.

  Veronica said, ‘When really it’s just desperately sad.’

  ‘And he didn’t say which café, so we can’t go and find him.’

  ‘But he wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Vicky told you, did she?’ Lesley’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. They were standing beside an overgrown field. In a far corner there was a ruined sandstone cottage.

  ‘Apparently he had something to tell you.’

  ‘Oh. Hah. Not really. I don’t know. All he would talk about was his art.’ She took a step towards her car, leaned against it. ‘He did a lot of weird drawings and stuck them on the gallery window this morning. Sometime after we were talking in the car. I told him I’d pulled them down. But, of course, he thought they were of extreme significance. He wanted me to study them closely. I said I’d left them in the gallery, but he had a stack of copies, so he gave me some.’

  Veronica sighed. This was Roland all right, distressed and confused, trying desperately to proclaim something to an unseeing world, without himself understanding what it was.

  ‘I looked at them, just to humour him. They’re all of girls who are dying in some way. Completely morbid. For a minute I thought he would use them to tell me something important about Treen. But no. It was still about the writing project. He seemed to think the jolly drawings would help me find a voice, whatever that means. But I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. I’ll show you.’

  She opened the back door of the car and leaned inside.

  The cottage across the field was made of large sandstone blocks and sun-bleached mortar. The doorway gaped open and feathery grass grew four feet high, right up to it. A Georgian roof, neat and tight, with no eaves, rusting corrugated iron. The windows were narrow and broken. One was covered in plywood.

  Lesley straightened and shut the car door. She was holding a stack of paper. ‘I did protest. I said we should at least talk about Treen, what he knows about her. But he put a hand on my forearm and gave it a little shake, as if I was a child. He said, “This is about her.” And then he showed me these weird arty things.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  On top of the pile was the same drawing that had been stuck on the shop in New Town, ‘Molly’. Standing in a slip beside a cairn.

  Lesley said, ‘It’s not clear whether the title refers to the child or the young woman. He said it was from a book called Silas Marner. Apparently there’s a character called Molly that no-one remembers.’ She put a finger on the drawing. ‘Molly takes morphine and freezes to death on a moor. So there’s some parallel there, but for the life of me, I have no idea what he’s trying to say. Do you?’

  She held the drawing in front of Veronica. ‘Except that she looks vicious.’ Molly’s mouth was small and ragged, like a hole worn through old cloth, rough, angry, unforgiving.

  ‘Roland said Molly is misunderstood. No-one cares about how things are for her. She’s just a mechanism that makes the real story happen to someone else.’ Veronica could still make out the word SILENT, but Roland must have changed his mind about it, because before he made the photocopy he had erased it, leaving just a faint trace.

  Lesley said, ‘Of course, really he had no intention of talking about Treen at all. I should have realised.’

  ‘What are the others?’

  Lesley turned to the next drawing. It showed a girl falling from a bridge. She had billowing skirts and a loose white bodice, and there was a shawl, fringed, flying up around her. Her name was written among waves in the bottom of the picture: BERTHA.

  Drawings again. Multiple meanings captured in fine black lines. Spaces. Shading. Truth that got further out of reach the harder she looked.

  These drawings were recognisably Roland’s. But they failed to reveal anything. They were shadows of his thoughts.

  Lesley said, ‘This is Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre, although that’s not how I remember Jane Eyre, do you?’ She raised an eyebrow, an attempt at irony. ‘Anyway, according to your dear son, that book is the same kind of thing. Nothing is shown from Bertha’s point of view. Her death is just there to make the real story happen for someone else.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘He said it was like murder mysteries. You know, Agatha Christie type things. He said the victims were ciphers, dying in someone else’s story. He said people need to be made to see.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘I don’t know. Someone has to be made to care. That’s why my little wr
iting piece will be so …’ Lesley spread her hands and threw back her head, quoting Roland, exasperated, ‘… vital.’

  ‘It’s a lot to ask.’

  ‘He said I shouldn’t force it. I should spend some time with the drawings. He said there are clues in them, which was a funny way of putting it.’

  ‘Did he mean clues to the murder of Treen?’

  ‘If so, it isn’t immediately obvious. Is it?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Bertha’s floating shawl was decorated with dragons and lotus flowers. Around one wrist she had a bracelet with a clunky clasp. That reminded Veronica of John’s jewellery, the new convict range.

  Lesley said, ‘He’s done two others.’ She turned the pages, reading the names. ‘Rosanna from … um, The Moonstone, I think, and Justine from Frankenstein.’ She handed the papers to Veronica. ‘But honestly, they’re nothing to do with Treen. In fact, they aren’t even real girls, are they? They’re characters. They’ve been dreamt up by authors, and then reimagined by him. I can’t come to grips with any of it. The harder I try the more they escape me.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can be any help.’ Veronica could hear wind pushing at the grass. At one end of the ruined cottage there was a crumbling garden wall with a wonky wooden structure holding a dead vine. ‘This is all a smokescreen. He wants to tell us what he knows about Treen but he can’t find a way. He’ll tell us soon. Tell you. If you could just keep listening to all this nonsense … At least he asks to see you.’

  Lesley leaned back on the car. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m taking over, Vee. That’s not my intention. He just thinks I’m better qualified to write about this. Women being unfairly branded as sinners.’

  Veronica laughed. ‘What do you mean, qualified?’

  Lesley threw her a pained glance, as if she was being made to repeat embarrassing and unnecessary details. ‘You know. Because I was such a sinner when I was young.’

  ‘A sinner?’

  Lesley’s lips twitched together and then released. ‘I told you about it.’

  ‘No.’