Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Something to say, Michael?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Will you lot stand still?’ The irritation with one was expressed against them all. Michael felt a brief draught of bitterness for all the mores that surrounded him. He would have to give Williams a chance to get rid of his contraband before he suggested a locker inspection. All this, although he had no respect for the fool.

  Patience waned as the car skidded from corner to corner. It could have been an afternoon rich with jokes as the grey sky winked through the windows and they were free of any of the gut-wrenching, silence-inducing panics. There was PC Singh, a steady constable of two years’ experience who joked; Michael, with more than five years on the clock, capable of uproarious laughter, and Williams who somehow deadened the atmosphere and began the teasing.

  ‘Still going out with that girl, Mick?’

  Michael hated being called Mick. A Mick was an Irish hooligan on the terraces.

  ‘Which girl was that, Will?’

  ‘Ohhhh, now he tells me! Who was there first then, apart from half the Army? Who did you take with you to see if we could find out where she lived?’ Michael had often regretted that. ‘Has she let you in yet, know what I mean? Not saying nothing, are you? Suit yourself.’

  They turned a corner at high speed, Michael driving as if the car was stolen so that Williams toppled over in the back seat. He recovered, sat forward and tapped stolid Singh in the front.

  ‘Here, you know what? Our Mick here is going out with the biggest scrubber of all time. Only he likes his birds to have practice, see? To make way for the big one!’

  The radio crackled with some meaningless message, a brief interruption. Michael’s back was broader than most, but he was seething. It touched a raw nerve as he’d been thinking that maybe he should have known sooner in his brief, intense and so far celibate relationship with Rose that she would be as loaded with grief as an anonymous parcel left on a station concourse during a bomb scare. All that fear last night, all that talk about being followed. All those difficulties ahead, rocks sensed but unseen, feeling ashamed for wondering if it was worth it and if he had the bottle to cope with a girl who was half angel, half mess.

  ‘Come on, Mick, you can tell us. What’s she like?’

  ‘You should know,’ he said evenly. Then slammed on the brakes on the car. ‘But I bet you don’t. That’ll be my privilege.’ In the same moment as spying the open door to an empty, half-derelict house in a street consisting of many of the same, Michael had made up his mind and felt a keen exhilaration, the way he did before a fight. Of course he had the bottle. Of course he’d go back and see Rose tonight. Of course he’d wait however long it took to get through to her and make things better. Like his dad with his mum. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work, but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

  ‘Here, Will, get out of this motor and see what’s wrong with that building. It wasn’t like that yesterday. Looks like someone’s broken in. Go on, get out and take a look.’

  ‘What about you two?’

  ‘Just get out. I’ll turn the car.’ Williams got out, whistling, and sauntered over to the broken door. Michael sped up the street.

  ‘Are we ditching him, then?’ said Singh hopefully. Michael grinned. The exhilaration of his own resolve was catching.

  ‘Like I told him, I’m just turning the car. Slowly.’

  When they got back, Williams was standing outside the house, businesslike.

  ‘Contact the key holder, do we? No-one about.’

  Michael peered into the dark hallway of a small, old, terraced house. Council owned, awaiting renovation and waiting a long time. ‘Looked inside, have you?’ he asked. ‘Squatters? Anyone in there been pinching pipes and fireplaces?’ He knew as he asked it the question was futile because Williams would not have been further inside than a few steps out of fear of the dark stairs and any lurking presence, and because, despite the arsenal in his locker, the silly fool didn’t carry a torch. Michael took his own from his belt and strode into the house without waiting for an answer. Singh followed. Williams came last.

  ‘There’s no-one there,’ he was saying lamely. ‘I’m sure there isn’t.’

  The intruders were long gone. Dust danced in front of Michael’s eyes in the dim light from a dirty window at the top of the stairs. The banisters had been removed, leaving drunken treads with traces of carpet. He shone the torch into the empty living room on the right where the ugly, twenty-year-old fire surround was still intact. In the back kitchen, there might have been a stone sink, he thought, knowing as he did the geography of the houses in these particular back streets better than the lines on his own hand. No stone sink, no copper piping either, but a smell of cat and mouse. Everything recyclable was gone. Michael retreated and went upstairs gingerly with each tread creaking under his weight. There was a pole of sorts which obstructed his entrance to the bathroom door and he pushed that aside, imagining he could almost hear the ticking of dry rot in a place like this, wait till he told Rose about it. Rose, he’d say, I’ve found our dream house … and they’d laugh. He shone his torch into the room where daylight was obscured by curtains drawn over a small window, bath gone, basin left. Yeah, love, he’d say, a real bijou residence. Michael squatted studiously to see if he could see if the removal was recent, looking for signs in the dust like footsteps in the desert, and then, the room came crashing in on him.

  Something the size of a railway sleeper hit the side of Michael’s head, felling him to the floor for the plaster to rain down on his back in sharp and blunt lumps while he registered nothing more than a vague surprise and no pain. Then stunned, but conscious, he was aware of footsteps on the stairs, shouting, thundering, and the light of his own torch, free of his hand, shining a futile beam into a corner. More noise, louder; then a silence full of images and a red glow behind his eyes.

  He thought with great clarity, I’m going to miss boxing next week, the championship, now is that a relief or not? And I’m going to miss Rose tonight.

  ‘I wish I knew where Rose Darvey lived, ‘ Helen said to Geoffrey Bailey, standing at his kitchen door and briefly admiring the functional nature of all she saw, himself included. Hostilities had not been resumed, but the morning’s sleep had been interrupted, admittedly late in the morning, by a phone call for Helen. Bailey had taken it, a man called some silly name like Dinsdale. ‘Sounds keen,’ he’d said wryly, handing her the receiver and watching her blush, very slightly, but still a blush on the pale, unmade-up face that Dinsdale never saw. ‘His toothbrush, is it?’ Bailey mouthed as she turned her back on him and cradled the receiver against her shoulder. She ignored him. ‘No,’ she was saying. ‘Sorry, I’m fully occupied this weekend,’ without specifying how she was occupied. ‘Would have been nice,’ she said to the voice on the phone, which Bailey found himself mimicking. Could I possibly speak to …? Naice, very naice. No-one at Bramshill talked like that. He also wondered how much of the conversation was for his benefit or the benefit of the man on the line who was obviously wanting her undivided attention. She had never mentioned a Dinsdale, which was suspicious in itself, since she could talk until the cows came home about everyone else they knew, especially if they had problems. Maybe this Dinsdale was the problem. Bailey told himself to remember that Helen did not play games, but then he was a policeman and knew there was no such thing as truly predictable behaviour. The phone call was not mentioned again. One of Bailey’s duties, both public and private, was to keep the peace and treasure it.

  There’d been some corny stuff, about come on over to my place, the vintage of a song he remembered and she did not, but she was easy to please today. The ceasefire, which had looked like remaining stable, almost broke when she slung his baggage to one side of her car and put some of her files in; had looked more fragile when he insisted on the supermarket and the dry-cleaners, and nearly cracked into ominous silence as he watched the way she drove. Still he was a man of iron reserve; he’d been driven by worse and at least
she knew she was bad. In the afternoon, they went back to bed. Housewarming, he said. In the evening he embarked on cooking. She read some of her damn files, to make Sunday less depressing, she said, and after a while came to stand at the kitchen door.

  ‘Rose Darvey? Oh, the case clerk you told me about.’ He never forgot a name or an anecdote. ‘Why do you want her address? She won’t thank you for calling on a Saturday night.’

  ‘Just a feeling. For one, I know she’ll be lonely. Unless she’s got the beloved Michael, of course, and that one’s invested with so much great white hope he might not turn out to be Saint Christopher. I can’t explain her. She’s woman and child, all wrapped up. Streetwise and childlike. No parents. I was thinking of her.’

  ‘You said “one”. What was two?’

  She looked blank, mesmerised by his activity.

  ‘The second reason for wanting to speak to her?’

  ‘Oh, that. I haven’t got the right files. Or something’s gone wrong. I noted in my diary a remand case for Monday, same court, asked for it to come back to me because I want to get the little bastard.’ She launched forward and picked up an olive from the work surface of the clean kitchen.

  ‘Tut, tut,’ he said, sweeping her away with an evil-looking knife.

  ‘But it isn’t here. Now, I told you, both of us were playing hookey on Friday, but I went back for my papers. That file isn’t on the list and it isn’t with me.’

  ‘Forget it. Tomorrow will do. We can go into the damned office and check. Open that wine, will you? Maybe the defendant’s died.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘Fat chance. Drunk drivers never die, if only more of them would. What the hell are you doing?’

  There was the satisfying sound of emerging wine cork. ‘Ooh,’ said Helen, casting her eye over the open page of his cook book. The page was already stained with his preparations. Bailey was a good cook; something you learned from following the recipes and being bothered to buy all the ingredients without substituting something else to save yourself another hundred yards.

  ‘One chicken, roughly four pounds, two large peppers, chorizo sausage, four ounces basmati rice, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, white wine, garlic, three ounces pitted black olives, sorry there’s only one ounce now,’ she added with her mouth full, ‘… cayenne pepper, three thousand other ingredients. I mean is that all, is that really all? What about the kitchen sink? And ear of bat and eye of toad? What do you have to do, apart from brown and chop and sauté and slop it all around and wait for Christmas?’

  ‘Eat it,’ he said, ‘in about an hour. And don’t be so morally superior about all things domestic. Especially cooking.’

  She paused with a bottle of wine in one hand and an olive stone in another and nodded.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am, a bit. I don’t mean to be, but I am and it must be irritating. And while I know I like it better cooked, left to my own devices, I’d probably eat the olives first and the chicken in a sandwich.’

  ‘You always admit your errors of judgement,’ he said, opening the oven door, ‘to exonerate them and have an excuse for going on exactly as before. A bit like a Catholic going to confession. How long does that recipe say for cooking? If you can bring yourself to read it.’

  ‘Geoffrey,’ she said, still leaning on the kitchen door. All conversations were fine until one sat down, they were somehow better on the run. ‘You know I told you about my day’s shopping with Rose Darvey? Well, we met up by mistake yesterday morning. In a pregnancy clinic.’ The oven door slammed shut on poultry magnifique. ‘And?’ said Bailey, even toned, busy.

  ‘And nothing.’ He wiped his hands carefully on a tea cloth, with his back to her, before turning round. He seemed to speak from the middle of the kitchen sink, and she heard him from the distance created by her well-controlled, dim ache of misery and disappointment and the struggle to stop crying which had been the hallmark of the week.

  ‘I have to go back to my course tomorrow evening. I think we have twenty-four hours.’

  ‘So long?’ said Helen, wanting to cry, hoping he noticed. ‘Really that long?’

  Walking was more difficult than usual for Margaret. It was as if the pain of her emotions had transferred itself to her legs and made her slower. On the way back down the street, having been spat out by the bus, it was only the ingrained force of polite concern which made her stop at Sylvie’s home to enquire after the granny. Her sense of failure was intensified by the presence of a young stranger, attempting to feed Sylvie in the kitchen. Sylvie was screaming and kicking. ‘I want to go with Mags!’ she yelled, but it was not gratifying: it was all for show. The parents were out. The old lady had died, said the stranger in a murmur, there was a lot to do. Leaving offers of help and messages of condolence, Margaret withdrew.

  No sign of Logo, but she knew he was there. She wished he would come and knock at her door, but she also wished he wouldn’t. She couldn’t contrive the expression of a lie, but she ached for the company, to talk about anything. Meeting Eenie had carried all her hopes for redeeming loneliness, but all it had done was confirm it. Margaret locked her door firmly. Later, she thought she heard the rumbling of his cart down the alleyway, but going in or coming out, she couldn’t be sure. By that time, Margaret was cocooned in her warmest nightdress and the luxury talcum had been used with great abandon. It was the best she could do for comfort.

  Logo sat in his bedroom and played with shadows. His reflection in the mirror, showing a puffed-up purple face, told him he was ill; his wiry constitution told him he was not. He was not sure which to believe. He still could not sing, but he could croak and howl in a kind of triumph.

  So. He had seen her and been driven off like a fox from the hens. Seen his Eenie child, fancifully named to remind his wife of the Ena Harkness rose she had once tried, in her usual, unsuccessful fashion, to grow in the backyard. They should have stuck to calling her plain Rose. ‘Eenie’ had soon been coined out of Enid at school. It was an ugly name, but it stuck somehow, as she grew ever more beautiful. A lithe, lissom, little thing with a bottom like a peach and long legs like a colt and all that glorious hair. When her mother had combed out that hair while the child stood still, temporarily mesmerised by the touch, Logo had watched, equally spellbound until the spell was broken by her energy and she twitched to move again. He would watch while the little body wriggled away with sinuous grace: enough, Mummy, enough of this being still. And then when Mummy began to go out, more often, as she grew bored with the child and the child with her, Logo and daughter would play together. Shadow play, she squealing and screaming with delight.

  At first, only shadow play. And then less and less of the delighted screaming until she was silent.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sunday afternoon saw the doorman at Helen’s office let Bailey past the door on the merest flash of a warrant card, nodding Helen through on sight of a small plastic permit because it looked the right colour. ‘You could have shown him your bus pass,’ Bailey said, admiring but aghast. ‘This place is about as secure as a football pitch.’

  ‘Or a lunatic asylum.’

  ‘No, far worse than that.’

  ‘Don’t tell,’ said Helen. ‘Everyone thinks it’s safe. The railings, you know.’

  No file, and no computer record of a file when Bailey found his way into the screen. No sign of back-up records in Rose’s neat hand. Helen looked in the open book which contained each person’s home address and phone number. Rose’s was crossed out. Secretive, isn’t she?’ Bailey commented mildly. Helen was defensive.

  ‘So? She may have reason, poor child. They may not have a phone.’

  ‘All teenagers have phones. They live on the phone.’

  Helen wasn’t listening. ‘I’ll have to ask for yet another adjournment. Unless the court’s changed the date, but it still doesn’t explain why everything’s gone from here. I could try the basement, but I don’t know where to start, all that paper—’

  ‘You said this would take one hour out of our twent
y-four,’ Bailey pointed out reasonably. ‘So far it’s taken two and a half. Come on, cases are lost all the time. You must be used to it by now.’

  ‘No.’

  There was that hard edge in her voice which he hated. ‘Losing them fairly in court is one thing. Losing them through negligence is another. Let’s go home. Your place or mine?’

  ‘Mine. Ryan’s collecting me later.’ She grinned an apology.

  ‘Good, we can have a drink then. With the steak. Just for something completely different.’

  Not perfect, but functioning as a team. This time she didn’t want him to go. Nor did he. Neither of them said so.

  And by Monday, the briskness and the fury were back in business. Because Miss Helen West was a dozen times more persuasive than her junior colleague, John Riley, she managed to secure a two-week postponement of the drink-drive case without papers. The expression of anger on the face of the defendant as he left the dock was one to which she was well accustomed, might even have sympathised with, if only he had not looked so sublimely smug before. Something was wrong; something stank with a lingering smell, sniffed but not forgotten, tucked away in the hurly-burly which followed. Two thieves, four burglars, one rapist committed for trial, a posse of football hooligans up for affray, five neighbourhood fights to be bound over, three arguments between prosecutor and the clerk of the court, one with the magistrate, but none with the defence, and Helen was out of there, back to the office at a canter. Racing up the stairs with a bright coat flying over funeral black, unselfconsciously elegant and consciously impatient with the world. On a good day, Miss West could move mountains. On a bad day, she blew up tunnels with herself inside.

  There was no sign of Rose. Off sick, someone said, she’d phoned in with a cough. Helen paused only to hope that Rose was not really sick but having a lovely time with Michael. Her own work ethic had taken a battering recently, she wasn’t going to impose it on someone with such a meagre salary. There was also a big distraction. Notices on desks. All professional staff to go to Redwood’s office at four o’clock. Helen went out to find Dinsdale, merely for the effect of his smile.