Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  ‘I’m sorry. That slipped out: we get so many snoopers. No, of course not. You knew him. What was he doing here? Do you know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Could it have had anything to do with your daughter? Was he helping you in some way? Was that it? Did he offer to carry out his own investigation, use his press connections to track down the murderer?’

  ‘No, never,’ I said.

  ‘Dr Hillenbrand, I want you to think this over. Your presence here today is a little odd. Inspector Ruthven was found murdered in the church where we found your daughter’s coat. Now a journalist who is a personal friend of yours turns up nastily murdered a couple of streets away, and you come along to check things out. Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?’

  I nodded. What else could I do? It seemed peculiar to me as well. Just what was going on?

  ‘Think about it, Dr Hillenbrand. If there’s something you haven’t told us, even if it’s just a suspicion, let us know. Lewis could have been killed because he got too close to your daughter’s murderer. What was her name, by the way?’

  ‘Naomi. Her name was Naomi.’

  ‘Well, maybe Naomi’s killer is round here somewhere waiting for his next victim. Another little girl, perhaps. You may know something that could help solve these crimes. You could stop the next one being committed.’

  ‘You think there will be another one?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Maybe you know better than I,’ he said.

  I did not answer.

  ‘May I go now?’ I asked.

  He paused, then nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you need to get in touch, you can get me at Old Jewry. My name’s Allison. Detective Inspector Allison. You can ring any time. Just ask the switchboard to put you through.’

  He stood and I followed him. At the door, I turned.

  ‘Liddley,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Look for someone called Liddley. That’s all I can tell you.’

  He held me for a long time with his gaze, then nodded.

  ‘Liddley?’ he said. ‘Very well. I’ll look for him. If you remember anything else, let us know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  I went back out into the sunshine and down the little flight of steps. From nearby came the sound of traffic speeding along Commercial Road. I set off down the narrow street, watching the sunlight fall on brick, the closed doors, the twitching curtains. A door opened on my right and a man looked out, watching me pass, a Jew with a long beard, one of the last to stay in the district. On the pavement, Bangladeshi children played while their parents remembered another sky and another sun.

  I had come so far for so little. God knows why I had told Allison to look for someone called Liddley. What had prompted me? Instinct, intuition, a flight of fancy? Or something more solid? I was getting in tune. With Liddley. With myself.

  Perhaps it was the same instinct that helped me make up my mind what to do next. I had thought of nothing on my way up to Town except finding the site of Lewis’s murder, as though the place itself might speak to me. But it had told me nothing, nothing I did not already know. I could have gone on to find the place where they found Naomi, but something told me I was not ready for that again.

  Instead, I found myself in Brick Lane. I think I had no idea where I was going until I made a left turn into a narrow street of dilapidated Georgian houses. At the end of the street, the tall black spire of an Anglican church was etched against the blue sky like a shadow. Even as I headed towards it, I felt a deep shiver pass through me. The day seemed colder, the sunshine less bright, less certain of itself. The sky lost its shimmer as low clouds scudded in from the east. My footsteps sounded hollow. There was no one in the street but myself.

  The church seemed deserted. Between the low perimeter wall and the front door stretched two patches of choked and dusty weeds. The weeds were ornamented with sweet-papers, a crushed beer can, cigarette stubs. The noticeboard sloped forward drunkenly, as though about to crash on to the pavement. One of its glass panes had been smashed. There were shards of glass on the ground in front of it. The only notice was a yellowed, curling sheet of diocesan headed notepaper giving the irregular times for services. It would be only a matter of time before St Botolph’s became a mosque or a bingo hall or a carpark.

  I pushed the main door. It opened easily, and I stepped inside. What little light crept through the windows lay exhausted on a place more wretched than holy. If this was God’s house, God must have been down to his last penny. The fabric was late eighteenth century, later than Christchurch, Hawksmoor’s neglected masterpiece on Commercial Road. Victorian restorers had done their best to cover the original interior. Modern shabbiness and occasional attempts to bring parts of the church into line with modern taste had made the worst of a bad job.

  I stared for a long time at a cheap candlestick on the altar, at a shaft of light creeping towards it and falling short. Ruthven had once put forward the suggestion that Naomi might have been killed here, actually here in the church. But they had found no evidence for that. No bloodstains, no hair, nothing that might have led to that conclusion. Nevertheless, looking around me, sensing the squalid ambivalence of the church, the underlying unease, I understood why he might have thought of it. And perhaps, I thought, just perhaps, he had been speaking the truth.

  The door to the crypt was on the right, between two large Victorian monuments. In spite of what had happened, it was unlocked. A lightswitch behind the door illuminated a naked bulb on the stairs and others lower down. A damp smell rose from below. There were thick cobwebs on the walls. I felt him, he was very close. But why? Why here?

  The crypt was laid out in narrow corridors with cells on either side. The cells were low chambers, each with its own door. On some of the doors the names of families had been painted on wooden tiles. At first, several of the names puzzled me. They were French names: Le Houcq, Crespin, De la Motte. And then I remembered the Huguenots, how they had come to London in such large numbers after the dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This must originally have been one of the French nonconformist churches they had built in Spitalfields.

  I walked slowly down one aisle, then another. Where exactly had they found Naomi’s coat? I wondered. A rat scurried lightly across my feet. I looked down and saw an empty Guinness bottle and a paper bag that might have held sandwiches.

  The spot where Ruthven had been found was still identifiable. Nobody had bothered rubbing out the chalk marking the outline of his body. There were still bloodstains on the floor. Someone had left flowers, perhaps one of his colleagues. Surely his wife had not come here. It occurred to me that I had never visited her. Quiet, it was so quiet.

  I thought I heard a whisper behind me. Starting, I looked round, but there was no one there. I looked down at the floor again. Not far from the chalk-marks, I noticed something, a small bundle of cloth. I bent down and picked it up. It was Naomi’s scarf. I held it tightly in my hand, remembering the last time I had held it, tying it round her throat to keep her warm.

  Slowly, I got to my feet. As I did so, my eye caught sight of the name-plate on the door in front of me. It did not register at first. Just another name, a French name like all the rest, belonging to a family of textile merchants: Petitoeil. This was the tomb beside which Ruthven’s body had been found. I remembered translating the name for Lewis: little eye. And I remembered Naomi’s words all those months ago: ‘He says he has little eyes, that his little eyes are watching me.’ And then I turned back and looked more closely at the name-plate on the door of the tomb. The last name bore a date of death that should have been familiar to me: 9 March 1865. The name was Jean Auguste Petitoeil: John Augustus Liddley.

  21

  I returned to Cambridge much shaken. The sunshine had gone as abruptly as it had come. I made the journey back through a darkening, wasted countryside. There was no need for me to check in the Register of Burials to know t
hat John Liddley – Little Eye, Petitoeil – had been interred in St Botolph’s crypt beside his father, his mother, and who knows how many other members of his family. What I could not understand was how his hand had reached out from the grave to strike down three innocent victims, to bring them so close to the place where his bones lay. I began to wonder just how long we had, how long it was before he came for Laura and myself.

  There was a message waiting for me at the porter’s lodge. My wife had called and would I please ring her back at my sister’s? It was the first I had heard from Laura in several days. During the past few weeks, we had spoken on the telephone half a dozen times and exchanged three or four letters. But neither speaking nor writing were easy for us, we both felt a terrible constraint, there were so many topics that we had to avoid.

  They were having dinner when I called. Carol answered the phone and spoke with me for a while, telling me how much she thought Laura had improved, how much good the break had done her. Then Laura herself came to the phone.

  ‘How are you, darling?’ I asked. ‘Carol says you’re feeling a lot better.’

  ‘Much, much better, dear. Carol has been an angel. And helping her look after Jessica has been a great help.’

  Jessica, Carol’s three-year-old daughter, was the result of a disastrous affair with a married man, a local building contractor with seven other children. Jessica, however, was not a disaster. She was adorable and adored, and if she had wrought a change in Laura, that was hardly a cause for surprise.

  ‘Charles,’ Laura continued without stopping, ‘I want to come home. I want us both to go back to the house.’

  ‘To the house . . . ? But, Laura, you know why we can’t do that, you know what happened.’

  ‘I know, I know all about that, but it’s going to be all right. Honestly it is. We’ve been making a mistake, a terrible mistake. There’s nothing to be frightened of, quite the contrary.’ Her voice fell almost to a whisper. ‘Darling, I’ve not told Carol this, I’ve not told anyone.’ There was a long hesitation, then she spoke in a sudden rush. ‘I saw Naomi. Here, last night, in my bedroom. She spoke to me, Charles, Naomi spoke to me.’

  A shudder passed through me. ‘Help me, Daddy. Help me.’ The words echoed through my head.

  ‘Darling . . .’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’m all right. I haven’t been hallucinating, I really saw her. You can’t find that hard to believe, not after the things we saw, not after the photographs and everything. You do believe me, don’t you?’

  My blood had gone cold, cold as ice. I believed her, God knows I did, why wouldn’t I?

  ‘She says we have to go back. She says she misses me, misses us both, she can’t sleep or rest or anything until we’re with her again.’

  ‘Darling, ghosts don’t sleep.’

  ‘How do you know what they do? Maybe they have lives just like ours. She’s our child, Charles, no matter what has happened to her, she is still our child. Or have you forgotten?’

  ‘No, I’ve not forgotten, love. How could I have forgotten that? It’s just that . . .’

  Laura butted in as though she had not heard.

  ‘She says we have to go back, that nothing bad will happen to us. All that talk about evil forces, that’s just that dreadful Welshman, that photographer. You know I never liked him from the beginning. I . . .’

  ‘He’s dead, Laura. Lewis is dead. I’ve just come back from London. He was found murdered last night. In an alley in Spitalfields, near where Naomi . . .’

  She cut me off again.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charles. Really I am. But I don’t see how that changes anything. I believe Naomi. She says Carol and Jessica have to come as well. Carol has already agreed. She doesn’t know why I want her to come, of course; but she says she has lots of paperwork that can be done anywhere and that she could do with help with Jessica for the next fortnight. So it all works out perfectly. You’ll see. There won’t be a thing to worry about. We’ll be coming tomorrow on the twelve-fifteen train. Can you be at the station? Or shall we get a taxi?’

  I said nothing. I was so cold, I felt as though I had bathed naked in the purest ice.

  ‘Aren’t you happy that I’m coming home, darling? Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  But I was cold, so very, very cold.

  They arrived the next day as promised. Everyone looked well. I played my part, picking up their luggage and driving them home like a dutiful husband and brother. We drew up outside the house as though nothing had happened, as though we had never been away. As we went in, I looked up at the attic window. There was no movement. Everything was still.

  Laura seemed happy still, buoyed up by her newfound devotion to Jessica. Lewis’s death seemed to have affected her not in the least. But, then, she hadn’t known him as I had. I decided to tell her nothing about the Spitalfields connections, about finding Liddley’s burial place. Maybe she was right, maybe all we needed was a chance to let things settle. Others had lived in the house before us without anything terrible happening, as far as I knew.

  Talking to Carol over coffee, I realized that she knew nothing of what had been going on. She simply assumed that the strain after Naomi’s death had proved too much for both of us and that we had needed some time apart. Perfectly natural, perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Why are some people so infuriatingly understanding? For all that, I hoped nothing would happen to disabuse her of her fancy.

  I left the three of them in the house that afternoon and returned to Downing. The discovery of Liddley’s tomb had only served to whet my appetite to know more of him. I spent three hours going over his letters, becoming intimate with his cramped but learned hand, his curious turns of phrase, his classicism. His correspondents were diverse in background, but not in temperament. Without knowledge of its ultimate purpose, life became meaningless, insipid, ultimately unsupportable. Only the man of courage, the man whose whole being had been tempered by suffering, could attain true wisdom and, from there, reach perfect knowledge.

  ‘The ordinary people, the commonality have no apprehension of such knowledge, nor do they strive after it or respect it,’ wrote one correspondent, a doctor of theology at the University of Leiden. ‘We, on the other hand, being privy to these arcane secrets, to the seed of that Universal Gnosis wherein lies the germ of All Things, may consider ourselves risen above the hopes and sentimentalities of the common herd.

  ‘Their morality, a small, cringing observance, a matter of custom and not of principle, we may hold for the nothing it is in truth. Rise above it, and you will see open about you hills and valleys of true behaviour and right action. A man may lie with a woman not his by law and yet garner sweetnesses above the pleasures of the marriage-bed. He may take that which is not his and yet confer a most estimable benefit upon its supposed owner. He may kill and yet bring life to his own soul and quicken thereby his own perfection and his love of Wisdom.’

  There was more, much more, in the same vein. Those of Liddley’s replies that have survived – he appears to have been meticulous at one stage in keeping copies of everything he wrote – were couched in similar language. I began to discern a pattern, a thirst, something that hinted – and at times more than hinted – at the desperation of a man who feels himself fettered, yet thinks he can smell the air of open fields and longs to run in them.

  The letters were suggestive, but they touched only on the edges of Liddley’s nightmare. Was it his search for knowledge and meaning that had driven him to his final darkness, or something else? I wanted an answer, and now I began once more to despair of finding one.

  It was as I was preparing to pack up and leave that I made the discovery which was to lead me to the truth – or as much of the truth as I could ever hope to come by. I put the letters back inside their box, tied it with ribbon, and put it to one side. Next to it was another box, from which I had taken several notebooks, none of which I had yet loo
ked at. As I began to replace them, my eye fell on one which was rather different to the others: a small, leather-bound volume bearing the inscription, Clinical Reports 1838–47, I had thought nothing of it, taking it for no more than a continuation of the earlier notes assembled by Liddley in his first years as a practitioner. But now, picking it up, I glanced idly inside.

  The handwriting was unmistakably Liddley’s. The entries were laid out by date, but the first passage on which my eye fell did not read like a medical report. I think it must have been the name Sarah that alerted me to the fact that this notebook contained something more personal than the others. A few minutes later, I was in an ecstasy of nervous excitement. The title was a deception: what I held in my hands was nothing other than John Liddley’s personal diary.

  22

  It was almost closing-time. The library was empty, I was seated by a pool of yellow light on my own. Burnett had gone into the stacks to replace volumes consulted during the day. It was a matter of moments for me to slip the diary into my briefcase, collect the other notebooks, and shuffle them back inside their box. A minute later, Burnett came back. I handed him the boxes. He scarcely looked at them. Two boxes borrowed, two boxes returned. We chatted for a few minutes about nothing of consequence, and I left. In those days, as now, Cambridge operated on a basis of trust. Senior members of the University Library did not require tickets to gain admission to the library, colleges were even more lax. Academics are not thieves until caught in flagrante. I was not caught.

  When I returned home, supper was ready. The table was aflame with candles. Red candles, chosen as though for some festivity, for the Christmas lunch we had never eaten. The house seemed more normal than it had done in months. There was not that weight on it, that sense of oppression and regret with which Laura and I had filled it.

  My wife and sister had spent the afternoon cleaning, playing with Jessica, cooking. They made a thing of it, they said it brought them together, two women and a girl-child making order of their lives. I felt excluded, even shunned. From the moment I set foot through the door, I felt as though my home had been taken away from me, I felt insecurity rise up in me like a bubble.