by John Barlow
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘When did you know?’
‘That it was you? When you walked out of the library. The bike was yours. You saw the police there, so you ignored it.’
‘You knew then?’
‘I didn’t want to believe it.’
She nodded.
Her movements were slow and deliberate now. The elegance of her expression was gone, replaced by a pastiness, a sudden stiffness, a sense of discomfort. Reality had finally hit.
‘Joe, I felt no compassion. I’m sorry, but I didn’t. Please know that.’
He looked at her, and felt a loathing for the world, for his job and everything it represented.
‘I understand,’ he said.
But he didn’t.
Then his bloody phone pinged.
‘I know it’s insensitive, but I have to check this.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she began, her voice trailing off.
He thumbed through the messages that had accumulated since he’d last checked fifteen minutes ago. Messages from Rita, Gwyn Merchant and Andy. Nothing new to report.
When he looked up at her, there was the slightest droop in her torso. Her eyelids began to flutter, and she struggled to keep them fully open. She was still smiling, though.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said again. ‘Justice has been done!’ Her eyes were full of fondness for him, but were not quite focusing now. ‘Go on, officer, make the arrest. You should. You should do it now.’
He studied her face, tried to assess the bare malevolence that must surely be there. But he could find none. He wanted to touch her, to… to what? He had no idea. He wanted the world to be different. And for that he felt weak, pathetic.
‘We can do that later.’
‘You’re the boss.’ Her words were slightly out of kilter. ‘It’s when the smell goes, y’know? From his clothes. You keep them all, but in the end you lose the smell of him… It fades until you don’t know whether you’re just imagining it. You can’t even remember what he smelled like, and it’s… just…’ She was struggling to keep looking at him, her eyes imploring, but fading. ‘There’s nothing left.’
Her head was moving, one way then the other.
He shifted in his seat. Saw something inside the dish. What was it? A light brown sludge in the bottom.
‘Ambulance!’ he shouted as he sprung up. ‘Ambulance now!’
He grabbed her under the arms and pulled her to her feet, bawling in her ear.
‘What was it, Chris?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, suddenly frail and vulnerable.
‘Tell me!’
He looked at the woman behind the counter, who was on already on the phone.
‘Overdose,’ he shouted. ‘Tell ’em we don’t know what she’s taken.’
He sat Chris on the edge of the table and got his wallet out. Ramming the corner of it into her mouth, he managed to prise her teeth apart enough to shove it further in.
‘No! No!’ she was trying to say, her body squirming in his grasp, too weak to resist.
He stuck his fingers into her mouth, waggling the wallet to one side so he could get the width of his hand inside. She tried to bite down, her eyes filling with tears and terror. The wallet was slipping out.
He had one arm around her body to keep her upright. He forced his other hand further in, ignoring the pain, knowing that her teeth had broken the skin of his fingers. She was biting hard. If the wallet slipped out, she’d be down to the bone. A low scream came from somewhere deep within her, but it was breathless and desperate, as her body flayed beneath her.
‘What was it?’ he shouted, knowing that she couldn’t tell him, not now.
She was resourceful, determined. It would have been enough. Plenty enough to kill her.
He wouldn’t allow that to happen.
When her body began to jerk, he knew he was there. Years ago, Andy had taught him how to make himself vomit, the squaddie’s nightcap. Eight pints and a morning shift looming, it was the best way to finish off a session. Just tickle the back of the throat ’til it spasms, then again, forcing yourself to go on, wiggling your fingers in until your stomach is empty.
‘Come on!’ he said, feeling the sweat on his face as he fought to keep his hand deep in her mouth.
One little spurt of bile. He pressed on. Her body went into spasm. He was losing her, but his fingers went further in, feeling the muscles of her throat contract around them like a soft embrace.
Then it came. A massive convulsion. Immediately another. Huge, hawking coughs from the guts. Her body was losing the last of its resistance. He struggled to keep her stable as sweet-smelling vomit covered him.
By the time it was over, she was hardly conscious. Joe’s face was streaming with sweat, and he was soaked in watery puke.
The woman in the café, not knowing else what to do, had gone outside to wait for the ambulance. The two uniforms from the patrol car saw her and came running.
‘Grab her,’ Joe shouted. ‘Overdose. She’s thrown it up. Keep her walking. Ambulance on its way?’
The woman nodded. She didn’t need to. They could hear the siren in the distance.
‘Right. Keep her awake. Keep her on her feet.’
He reached for his phone and dialled. His hands were shaking, and there was blood on his fingers, mixed with the slime of her vomit. He looked down at his Burton’s two-piece. It shone in the morning light, as if a monster slug had crawled across it. And to be honest, he told himself, it didn’t look much worse than normal.
‘Rita? I’ve got her.’
Epilogue
47
He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked across the street. The old red brickwork was a rich, dusky brown, as though the house had been sitting on a beach for the last twelve decades and had now reached the point at which it couldn’t get any more sunburnt. The lintels, though, were a little lighter than he’d expected. Someone had been having at ’em with a scrubbing brush, just like his grandma used to do.
To his right, out across the main road, was the Brick pub. He checked his watch: still plenty of time. So he stayed where he was, turning to look again at the terraced houses in front of him, craning his neck to admire their black slate roofs, neat and symmetrical after all the years. His grandparents used to boast that the builder had gone bankrupt after building these. He’d used high-quality materials, too high, put himself out of business.
The front door opened and a woman appeared. She had long auburn hair and pale skin. With the door ajar she hovered there, neither in nor out. She was looking at Joe, but standing at an angle, trying to make it appear that she wasn’t. For a second he considered walking briskly away. Yet he paused. And as that second of indecision became two, then three, he realized how unnerving it would be for her if he were to leave now; that some weirdo had been staring at her home, only to disappear with no explanation.
He raised an arm as he crossed the road.
‘Sorry!’ he said, noting that the tiny patches of lawn in the front yard were well-maintained, and dotted with plastic toys.
He repeated his apologies as he got to the gate, speaking across the four or five yards that separated them, his voice raised against the niggling wind. Meanwhile, she regarded him with a strange combination of trepidation and amusement.
‘I’m a police officer.’
The words worked some sort of magic. Her face relaxed, and the door swung open.
‘DS Joe Romano,’ he added, holding up his card as he walked up the narrow path for the first time in twenty-odd years.
She nodded, looking at the bandage on his right hand as he approached.
‘I thought I recognized you.’
‘Really?’
‘Detective Romano. Your photo’s been in the papers. Those murders? Congratulations, by the way. You got her.’
‘Yes, we did. Thanks.’
‘I assume you’re here to see the house?’
She m
ight have been thirty, with the casual air of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, one wearing baggy jeans and a shirt of a wilfully dull green colour.
‘The old deeds have your name on them,’ she added, as they stepped through the door and found themselves in the front room. ‘I mean, your family’s name. Gustavo, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. My granddad,’ he said, shocked to find that he had almost no recollection of how the place had been all those years ago, when he’d played there as a kid.
It now looked like something from a magazine, the home of an aging rock star or a venerable actor: book-lined walls, a mixture of old and new furniture, nothing even vaguely Scandinavian, framed paintings and a vintage hearth so utterly original that it took him a while to work out that, of course, it wasn’t original at all.
‘My grandparents saw him once.’
‘Him?’
‘Gustavo Romano. They saw him perform.’
‘Jesus, that makes me feel old!’
‘Charlie Cairoli, too.’
‘I bet. Good old Charlie! My granddad became his agent, you know? Grandma hated him!’
‘Cairoli or granddad?’
‘Just Cairoli, I think!’
She smiled, nodded.
They stood for a while in silence.
‘Everything seems so… different!’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s mainly a lick of paint and some new curtains.’
The walls were a dark grey-green, the matte paint so sombre and unforgiving that it added a kind of gravitas, perfectly setting off the paintings, which were in various styles, but mainly modern.
She seemed to enjoy watching him as he spun very slowly around, taking it all in.
‘My partner teaches at the university,’ she said, indicating the bookshelves that had been built into the recesses on either side of the hearth, crammed full of books, until not an inch of the wall behind could be seen. ‘There’s mine as well. I mean, you just accumulate books, don’t you? I hate to get rid of them. There’s tons more upstairs.’
‘Yes, it’s hard to know where to put them all,’ he lied.
His entire collection amounted to four removal boxes, none of which had been opened since they arrived back in the UK. They were still in the space under the stairs in his rented semi, the boxes neatly labelled: uni, fiction, non-fiction, work/misc. Several times he’d considered throwing them out, only to find himself unable to do it.
‘So,’ she said, ‘is there anywhere in particular you’d like to see?’
‘Actually, there are a couple of things, if it’s not too much trouble. You know, it might seem strange, but I’ve always wondered whether the old mangle is still in the cellar.’
‘Ha! Follow me!’
She led him into the kitchen. It was the same tiny space that he remembered, although completely refitted, so tightly crowded with new cupboards and shelving that there hardly seemed enough space to move, let alone cook. Yet there was a comforting kind of coldness to it, and a familiar smell of flour and butter, like there had been all those years ago. A deep yearning for the past hit him in the stomach, a desire to be transplanted there, back with his grandma, as if everything in the world might be resolved if only the verities of former times were within reach.
‘Here it is,’ she said, standing back to reveal an old sink, the kind that one might expect to find in the scullery of a far larger old house.
And above it was his grandma’s old mangle. It had been taken off its frame and mounted on the wall, so that it could be swung out over the sink, then back against the wall when not in use.
‘It was still in the cellar when we moved in. There’s nothing much down there now. We can’t afford to seal it against the damp, not yet. Something for the future. Here, have a go.’
She stood back and let him crank the mangle, ignoring the pain from his bandaged fingers. It was just the same, the wooden handle was still loose, and the mechanism still turned with a surprising stiffness. A little too hard for a young kid. His grandma had always had to stand behind and help him.
‘It means we don’t have to have the dryer on all the time.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
‘We did a bit of research into your family after we moved here. Quite a fascinating story.’
‘Sicily to Leeds!’
‘And Blackpool.’
‘Yes, the summer seasons. But mainly here. Upstairs, I mean.’
‘Here?’
So he told her the story. His granddad had been drinking at the White Swan in Leeds, down behind the City Varieties theatre. It was February the fourteenth, 1957, the day that Bill Haley arrived. The whole city came to a stop as people flocked into City Square to catch a glimpse of the American star emerging from the station. Gustavo couldn’t get a tram home, and had to walk most of the way. Later that evening he switched on the television set in the front parlour, and Bill Haley’s arrival was on the local news. ‘I don’t want to be Charlie Cairoli’s sidekick forever!’ he announced. ‘I’m in the wrong game!’ With no one able to persuade him otherwise, he penned a letter of resignation to Blackpool Tower Circus, where he still had a contract for the following season. With that, the Romano Theatrical Agency was born.
‘And,’ Joe said, hoping his story hadn’t bored her, ‘for the rest of his life, the agency was based right here, up in the attics.’
‘Would you like to see them?’
The narrow stairs creaked a little, but they were carpeted now. It hardly seemed like the same house. The chilly bareness of the disused top floor had gone, replaced by the smell of someone else’s children, like cheese rinds and warm flowers.
In the first of the little rooms there was Lego everywhere, and amid it, tucked under the sloping ceiling, a low-slung bed with a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet.
The aura of happiness was striking. He tried to imagine what it must be like for a young kid to come up here every night, to climb the steep, narrow path to their own little sanctuary at the very top of the house. His granddad had died before he really knew him, and after that his dad moved the agency to offices on Town Street, just up the road. So, he’d never known the attics as anything other than cold, bare rooms. His grandma refused to let them be used for anything else.
‘We stopped trying to get them to tidy up,’ she said. ‘And to be honest, we prefer Lego to them being glued to screens all day.’
‘I’m with you on that.’
He tried to imagine the plastic flowers in the hearth, the old floorboards, the cold, damp air. But he couldn’t. It had gone. All of it
‘You got kids?’
‘One. He’s at university. Funny thing, but I can never get him to use a screen. Not to contact me, at least!’
‘Well, I’m sure he’s very proud of you, I mean, about the Graphite Assassin and everything.’
He thought about it.
‘She’s in custody now. It was a sad case, in many ways. Did you follow it?’
‘Yes. I think most people did.’
He wondered whether she’d be amused to know that Sam and his girlfriend were the main reason why the case had generated so much press interest. He decided no. Other people’s stories? They’re never quite the same; they don’t mean that much. And now it was over. It was all over. Clowns, the agency, the Romanos.
It had been over for years.
‘Thanks for showing me this,’ he said. ‘I should be going.’
Rita was waiting for him in the Brick, thumbs busy on her phone, an untouched pint of lager in front of her. She saw him come in, watched as he got himself a drink and came over to join her.
‘The hero returns! Commendation in the offing, I hear.’
He grunted a reply and got his head down into his pint.
There’d been a reception at Elland Road earlier in the afternoon, just a plastic cup of white wine and a round of applause. But his self-sacrifice had been noted, and there was a new air of cautious reverence in the way his colleagues spoke to him. He’d ignored accusations of socialising with
a suspect not once but twice, the second time whilst suspended. That took some guts. They were impressed by his commitment, but also wary of it, knowing that they would never have risked their careers like that, dating a suspected murderer.
‘And you took all that flak!’ she said. ‘Budding romance with a witness… in the national papers, social media… kicked off the case… And to think it was all part of the investigation!’
‘Extra mile, Rita. Extra mile.’
It had been more than that. She knew it, and so did he.
She let his words hang there between them, her lips pursed in a bad attempt to hide a smile.
‘Those long, thoughtful pauses?’ he said. ‘They don’t work with me. You know that, right?’
‘You got her, Joe. That’s the main thing,’ she said, looking up to see Jane Shaw appear at the door. ‘Whatever else you had in mind.’
‘I…’ he began.
But Rita was grinning, irritatingly self-righteous. It was too late. He’d never be able to explain.
‘Hi, Jane,’ he said, jumping to his feet. ‘Good to see you.’
He introduced the two women, then dashed off to get Jane a drink.
Since the arrest of Saunders, he’d spent quite a bit of time with Jane Shaw. There’d been odds and ends to clear up with her statements, and she’d been grateful for someone to talk to. He’d even helped her to sort out the insurance claim on the car and to make a start on the paperwork to settle her son’s estate, which wasn’t going to be straightforward.
‘Did you manage to finish all those forms?’ he asked as he set Jane’s drink down in front of her and retook his seat.
She nodded, but without much interest.
‘Rita says they’re giving you a medal.’
‘A commendation. It’s not even a certificate.’
‘Not many folk would’ve done all that for Craig, not the way you did. I still don’t know how to thank you.’
‘I did my job. Like everybody else.’
‘But you got all the stick. And that!’
He smiled, flexing his bandaged hand a little.
‘You know, most of my family were in show business, one way or another. But I was the first one to make it onto the front pages!’
