Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that again,’ he says. He thunders out of the room, and you reach for the door of the cupboard to pull yourself up. You do not know what you have said. You had only begun your speech about knees. He should have let you get to the part about washing the floor.

  You hear her for the first time. You turn on the radio and there she is. She sings, ‘I Don’t Know If I’m Coming Or Going’. You walk out of the house with her name on your bps. That is all you have. You don’t know she is a black woman. You don’t know she is dead. You don’t know that her voice will haunt you for the rest of your life. Lady Day. You will name your son after her.

  The trouble with Arthur was his need for violence. He was the son of a miner. He had been in that war. It was not easy for him. He could never be sorry about it. There was always justification. Violence to him was a kind of love. And you were his wife. And he loved you. In his way.

  And you loved him. And you did love him, Dora, in spite of the beatings. It wasn’t as if he beat you every night, or even every week. Only when you crossed him. Only when he realized that he had been wrong. The rest of the time you could love him. For a while, at least. A long while. Some years. Hoping all the time that he would change. That he would begin to see your world, as you strove to see his. Hoping that he would see the futility of the violence, that he would recognize that he could not hurt you, even if he killed you. And it was too many beatings later before you realized that you were not a wife at all. That you were a symbol. A hated symbol. That you had been replaced in his mind by some thing.

  You held your breath too long in those days. You should have raged. You had every right to rage, Dora, while Arthur was squeezing the life out of you. While he appropriated all the life forces that came into the family, all the forces of renewal and regeneration, and grew stout and red-necked. You should have gone underground, poisoned his food, sawed through the leg of his chair. It would have been worth it. He would have seen you then.

  But you were a traditional girl, like your mother before you. You believed that Arthur should come first, that he should get the best cut of the joint, that his ideas and aspirations were more informed, more valid. You believed in sacrifice, Dora. You were a mystic.

  There was a more or less hazy conviction that if you gave your life to him, he would, like God, give life back to you. But for Arthur there was no mysticism, only duty. And he was short on that. Arthur went through life explaining everything. He left a trail of destruction behind him.

  After Billy was born you decided to leave him. How long after Billy was born? A week, Dora? An hour? Perhaps it the moment of birth itself, the child being an image of release. Suddenly it was possible to throw everything off, to leave yourself vulnerable. Then it would be up to you. But it was not courage. It was desperation that drove you to leave. You had seen yourself in a mirror, seen your hopelessness the dark rings around your eyes, the pathetic smile. You could not afford to lose more weight. The midwife had shaken her head at your lies.

  If it had been courage, Dora, you would have left at once, but desperation kept you going for another five years. Five years in which Arthur grew larger, more dominant every day. Five years in which you furiously fuelled your hatred of him. Five years in which you grew bolder, more reckless, in which you listened and did not speak. It was during that time that your body coddled the seeds which now swim as eggs and discs beneath the skin. Without those five years you would still be healthy, Dora. You would still be young for Sam.

  6

  Marie Dickens had drawn Edward Blake, the husband. She had not spoken to him on the telephone, but dealt with his secretary. The first story was that his appointment book was full for the next two weeks. But when, at Marie’s suggestion, the secretary had consulted her boss, it turned out that his itinerary was not as rigid as it had appeared. Marie’s appointment was fixed at three-thirty that same afternoon.

  She used the ladies room before going in to see him. A hair had appeared on her left cheek, and she plucked it and flushed it down the drain. Where did they come from? Facial hairs, Jesus. Didn’t they know she was a woman?

  He was a tall man, three or four inches over six feet, broad shoulders. His suit was silver-grey, tailored well to hide a paunch; conservative tie and shoes. He had a small but immaculate collection of chins. His hair, which was plentiful, was a couple of inches longer than you would expect. Vanity, thought Marie. And a sexual magnetism about him which he did nothing to disguise.

  His smile was disarming. It activated well over half a century of laugh lines, but in no way diverted one from the serious and deep-brown hue of his eyes. The man’s ace, however, was in the timbre of his voice. Marie had never quite worked out if that professional voice was a gift from God, or something that was developed. Many politicians had it, some broadcasters and actors, and the best doctors and salesmen. It was designed to put you at your ease, take you off guard, so that you could be severely shafted from the rear.

  Marie sat down.

  ‘I thought you might have brought me a cheque,’ he said. He could have smiled again, then. It was hard to tell.

  ‘Not part of my brief, I’m afraid, Mr Blake.’

  ‘But off the record, of course, can I look forward to early settlement now the police have dropped the case?’

  ‘As I said, that’s not my department. But I have been led to believe that our investigation is not to be protracted unnecessarily.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I have to ask some personal questions,’ Marie explained. ‘And I’m also going to have to talk about your late wife, India. I don’t want to upset you in any way, but—’

  ‘Just ask,’ he interrupted. ‘During the time I was in police custody, any feelings I may have had were completely shredded. I assure you I won’t be upset. My only desire is to put the whole sorry story as far behind me as possible. I’ll answer all your questions as fully as I can.’

  ‘Did your wife have any intimate friends?’

  ‘I’m sure you can do better than that,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, a private investigator with a sense of delicacy. This really won’t do, Ms Dickens. What you mean is, was my wife having an affair? Did she have a lover? Isn’t that what you’re saying?’

  Marie nodded.

  ‘No. India was a faithful wife. She did not have a lover.’

  ‘But would you have known? Many cuckolded husbands are the last to suspect.’

  ‘Is that the voice of experience?’ A hard edge had come into his tone, and he checked that now. ‘I’m sorry. I try to be objective, but it still gets to me. My wife was eighteen years my junior, but I believe she loved me. You may well think I’m an old fool who’s deluding himself, and you are, of course, free to hold any opinions you wish. But I’m sure you’ll take your investigation into other quarters, as did the Police before you, and I doubt very much if you’ll turn up any evidence to the contrary. My wife was faithful, and she was murdered by a kidnapper who was clever enough to avoid capture. I know that is not a very satisfying solution for you, and I assure you that it is not for me, either. But it is all we have got, Ms Dickens. And unless the kidnapper decides to come forward and identify himself, it is all we are likely to have.’

  ‘What about the insurance?’ Marie asked. ‘Why did you insure your wife for such a large sum at that particular time?’

  ‘My financial adviser had a heart attack. I had liquid funds to dispose of. An insurance policy seemed a good idea.’

  A very good idea, thought Marie. Especially in retrospect.

  ‘I bought a small house as an investment at the same time. And a car. All during the same week. You can ask my secretary for the accounts when you leave. I’ve asked her to give you access to anything you think pertinent.’

  She was a middle-aged secretary with a blue rinse and a tired smile. Definitely not a steroid enthusiast. Marie didn’t have to ask to discover that the woman had three children (all girls, to her husband’s eternal disappoin
tment) before retraining and returning to work. This was her fourth job during the second phase of her working life, and Marie foresaw that the woman would have several more in the future. It was impossible to stop her talking. She was like an amplifier: tuned in to her own internal stream of consciousness and broadcasting out to the universe.

  She found some of the documents Marie needed, but couldn’t put her hands on the bank statements covering the week when Edward Blake had taken out the insurance policy on his wife. ‘Goodness, I had them earlier,’ she said. ‘Mr Blake thought you’d want to check them, and I made a point of getting them ready. You know how it is, I’ll find them as soon as you’ve gone. Probably be looking out of the window to see if your car’s gone from the car park.’

  ‘You could fax them to the office,’ Marie told her, giving a card, trying to make a getaway before the woman worked up a second steam.

  When she got back to the car park Marie checked the car for tracking devices. Women like the blue-rinse secretary always seemed to know where to find her. Once inside the car she let the engine turn over while she sat with her forehead on the steering wheel, her eyes closed. ‘If there’s a god ’ she said, speaking into the far reaches of the cosmos, ‘please don’t let me end up like that.’

  Dr Simon Cod met Marie at the entrance to his office in the York District Hospital. He was a full head smaller than her, maybe forty years old. He had a broad smile, carefully cultivated to hide every one of his feelings. To Marie’s knowledge he never took it off. Perhaps, if a person was to go to bed with him, get really intimate, he might remove it then? Marie didn’t know, and she didn’t intend to find out. A night with a guy that short, and for what? So he could stop smiling for a while? Christ, right after breakfast he’d look just the same as he did every other day of his life.

  The smile was there now, on his face, and it really was very good. You wouldn’t know it was a mask unless you spent some time with him. He had all the earnestness of a Lada salesman.

  ‘Marie,’ he said. ‘Still playing at being a detective, I see. Such a shame, when you have good qualifications, excellent experience. You’re sadly missed in the department.’

  That was another thing. It wasn’t just the smile. The sad little bastard was patronizing, too. But Marie could play that game.

  ‘It was you who gave me the idea, Simon. Pathology is a kind of detective work, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pathology? Yes, I suppose so. Post-mortem certainly is, and I think that’s why you’ve come to see me.’

  He led her into the office and retrieved a large file, which he flipped open. ‘Mrs India Blake, deceased.’ He sighed looking down at a photograph of the woman, taken a few weeks before her abduction. ‘Such a waste.’

  Marie looked over his shoulder. India Blake had been a striking woman. She was thirty-six, but could easily have passed for someone in her late twenties. The photograph was taken by some fashionable professional, and showed a beautiful woman wearing a thirties’ style coat with heavily padded shoulders. The coat was open, revealing a black lace blouse and a skirt with a cut to die for. The gaze of the woman was upward, past the left shoulder of the photographer, nonchalant, wistful, as though the camera had caught her unawares, in a private moment.

  Behind her was a parapet, and beyond that a series of rooftops. It could have been taken on the city walls, or the roof of the Minster, but Marie didn’t think so. Maybe the photographer had a penthouse studio somewhere?

  Cod handed her a list of substances found in and around the allotment shed. ‘That’s a list of everything we’ve identified,’ he said. ‘The second column shows where it was found, and the third column is a guesstimate of the approximate quantity.’

  The next photograph had been taken inside the allotment shed shortly after the corpse had been found. If you looked really hard you could have identified her by the hair. There was no face left. The bugs and crawlies had got inside her eyes and stripped the flesh from her nose. Her lips had gone, as had most of the tissue from the inside of her mouth. There was still some flesh on her forehead and chin, creamy coloured, like full-fat cheese, but with black marks.

  The body had been concealed beneath the flooring of the shed. A couple of teenagers looking for somewhere to screw had disturbed the flooring and found something that put a strain on their relationship before it ever got going.

  ‘Piophila casei,’ Simon Cod told her. He held up a cellophane bag. Inside was a small fly. ‘Known as the cheese skipper, because it’s a pest in stored cheese and bacon, which to its simple mind is dead meat. This is the adult variety. She appears quite early on a dead body, but her larvae are never apparent before two months, and often take between three and six months to show themselves. There were no cheese skipper larvae on the body of India Blake.’ Marie peered at the fly, but didn’t find it very interesting. ‘OK ’ she said. ‘So this, thing, tells us that death occurred less than two months before the body was discovered. So she was alive for about a month after she disappeared?’

  ‘Right. But, speaking biologically, death is more of a process than an event. Different tissues and organs die at different rates. We also found these.’ He showed her another sample. ‘The pupa of Diptera, blowflies to you. The adults are usually the first to arrive, they colonize the natural openings of the body, the mouth, nose, eyes, ears, vagina, penis, anus, and any injury sites.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Marie.

  The doctor smiled. ‘Yuk, indeed, Marie. Having said all that, they usually concentrate on the head area, or on open wounds. But in the case of Ms Blake there was a heavy infestation of the vaginal area. This would lead us to suspect some injury in that area, maybe the result of a rape, perhaps something worse.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘There wasn’t enough tissue left to know, but the circumstantial evidence leads us to speculate.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes, these little chaps’ - he indicated the pupa of the blowflies - ‘tell us almost to the day when she died. Give or take a day either side, she had been dead for three weeks.’

  ‘No longer?’

  He shook his head.

  But she was missing for three months. How long does it take to starve to death?’

  She didn’t starve to death. She dehydrated. She was undernourished, too. There seems little doubt that she was abandoned there. Whoever put her in the hole left her with no food or water.’

  ‘How long?’ Marie said.

  He shook his head. ‘A week? She wouldn’t know much about the last couple of days.’

  ‘But why keep her alive for two months, longer than that, and then leave her to die?’

  ‘You asking me?’ said the doctor. ‘I thought you were the detective.’

  ‘And the pregnancy,’ said Marie. ‘How old was the foetus?’

  ‘Sixty to sixty-five days. It was developing in very bad conditions. But somewhere around there.’

  ‘A couple of months. About the same time she was kidnapped?’

  ‘Yes. Just before or just after.’

  He sat at his desk beaming at her as though he’d invented her. Christ, she thought. Dr Simon Cod. Not exactly a traffic stopper. When Marie had worked at the hospital he’d sniffed around her as if she was a bitch on heat. He was the kind of guy, when he wasn’t around any more, you missed him like a cold sore.

  She glanced at the list of substances found in and around the allotment shed. Many of the names were unreadable, but some she recognized. Charcoal, cyanide, Dettol, glycerine, greasepaint, horse manure, nicotine, nitrate of soda, paraffin, pyrethrum, soot, talc, Vaseline, washing-soda, wood-ash... Marie dropped the list on to the passenger seat and turned on the ignition.

  One or more of those substances could have been brought into the shed by the murderer. But which one? And even if it was possible to isolate one of them, and say, yes, this is it, this is what he brought with him, what then? Where would it lead say, if murderer had left behind a quantity of tincture of opium?


  They were waiting for her in the sitting room in Sam and Dora’s house. Sam had gone upstairs to talk with Dora, but Geordie and Celia were sitting there, drinking Sam’s coffee which was the best coffee in the world. And Geordie introduced her to the other guy, J.D. Pears, the writer. I suppose you have to call it chemistry, she thought. It was there right from the first moment they clapped eyes on each other. He couldn’t hide it, he was really interested in her. And she was so taken with him she didn’t hear a word Geordie said. Only J.D. Everything else was a blur.

  ‘What?’ she said, taking her eyes off the guy before everyone got embarrassed.

  ‘J.D. Pears,’ said Geordie. ‘Sam says it’s OK for him to follow us around. He’s doing research.’

  ‘For a book,’ J.D. explained. ‘I write crime novels. Need some info on how you gumshoes work.’

  Marie nodded her head. She wanted to take his glasses off, ruffle his hair a little. But then again she wanted to leave him exactly as he was. Not spoil the picture one little bit. Except maybe for the beard.

  ‘So,’ he continued, ‘would you mind if I join you for a few days? I’ll only be hovering around in the background.’ Marie was still nodding her head.

  Celia, Sam’s elderly secretary, said, ‘Marie, sweetheart, why don’t you sit down, have some coffee. You look like you’ve had a busy day.’

  By the time Sam came down and Marie had got halfway through her second cup of coffee, she’d begun to be coherent.

  She told them what the doctor had said about the body, and gave her impressions of Edward Blake.

  ‘Did he do it?’ asked Geordie. ‘You think he killed her?’

  ‘He’s decidedly iffy,’ Marie said. ‘But that doesn’t make him a murderer.’

  ‘So I missed something today,’ J.D. said. ‘You’ve been grilling the main suspect, and I wasn’t there.’