Shadow Play

by Frances Fyfield

  Redwood had thought twice about staying late in the office on this particular Friday, since it did not do, in the current climate, to act in any way out of the ordinary. Whatever was going on here, he was sure he did not want to know, but his habits of insecurity could only die hard and he needed this sneaking about as much as he needed the evening drink when he got home. And there was something he had to do, could only do with the place empty, and that was somehow secrete or destroy all those case records which had got inside his desk as the result of expeditions like these. All he had achieved this week was procrastination, shuffling jobs around and the invention of another form which they would all accept in the end provided he never had a meeting to discuss it. In the meantime, he had this worthless cargo to unload which, if found, would brand him as a sneak or worse.

  His idea of upstairs, downstairs was sound as far as people were concerned, but he was less good at geography. He aspired to the discovery of a sort of incinerator device such as he had in his garden, and might otherwise belong in the cellar of a place like this. The building had a basement, didn’t it? Files came up and down from somewhere like prisoners being shown daylight from the hold of a ship. Somehow Redwood imagined the paper moving itself into the ancient goods lift on their floor without human guidance; he also imagined that everyone here hated the place equally and that none of them ever ventured to explore if they could avoid it. Armed with cunning and nervousness he kept on descending stairs and wondered if he would ever find his way back.

  It was dark down here, oh yes, extremely, but there were also lights and it was warm. By the time he rounded the corner to where the boiler was locked away, humming loudly, he already felt he was about to meet a ferocious animal and was glad there was no incinerator to be found. This building has too much heat, he decided, lights left on everywhere, disgraceful, and too much hot water, with the noise that thing made, a fiver a breath; he could do something about that, surely. Now, where could he hide these notebooks since they were not for burning. If he took them home his wife would notice them.

  Blundering about he found a small room, just off a large empty space, and stopped in surprise. He could have sworn he heard someone throwing something towards the window. There on the floor was an anglepoise lamp plugged into the single point, recognisable anywhere. Helen West’s lamp, old but coveted, and what was it doing down here? Redwood took the lamp, meaning to return it. On his way to search for the stairs he found a suitably old and disused radiator behind which he stuffed Rose’s notebooks. Nobody who counted came down here; it wasn’t even very clean.

  Puffing up the stairs, confused by the alien regions of the first floor and the constant choice of exit, he thought about the lamp. Wait a minute, he wouldn’t put it back, a dead giveaway of Friday-night sneaking. Some might call it evidence. Redwood was confused. He left the lamp in his own room: somehow that seemed better and less incriminating, although he didn’t know why.

  The doorman was not at his post, but there was nothing unusual in that and the overhaul of security didn’t begin for a week. Redwood let himself out of the front door, feeling like the keeper of a castle but not the king, never too keen on signing out and signing in anyway, especially on Fridays. Clutching to himself the important-looking briefcase containing very little, he strutted down the steps. Straight into a little man standing in the street, rubbing his wrists, appearing out of the dark, bowing.

  ‘Excuse me, sir …’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Redwood, sidestepping and striding on, momentarily afraid until he reflected that muggers weren’t usually middle aged and knee high to grasshoppers, even he could work that out, it said so in the files; all of which occurred to him in the first two seconds of his flight down the street before he realised that the little man was following, running to keep up.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, excuse me …’ Redwood wished people never said that. It created an instant obligation.

  ‘What?’ he barked, turning, holding the briefcase in both arms like a shield. ‘What do you want, man? I haven’t any money and I’ve got a train to catch.’ Both were true. The face, on a level with his briefcase, looked harmless and smiling, but showed signs of having been in a fight. He relaxed a little.

  ‘I don’t want nothing, if you’ll excuse me, sir, but I was waiting out here for my daughter. She works alongside you, sir, said she’d meet me here … I didn’t like to ring the bell, she must be working late.’

  ‘Name of?’ Redwood barked.

  ‘Enid …’ the man hesitated, but Redwood was already barking back. He knew all the names off by heart, but could never quite connect them with the right faces.

  ‘No-one left in there at all. Even the doorman’s asleep, at eight o’clock, I ask you,’ he added for good measure. ‘And no-one named Enid at any time of day. Wrong building.’

  He marched off. Logo watched. My, weren’t they all such dreadful liars.

  ‘Her granny called her Rose!’ he shouted after the retreating figure. ‘Rose!’

  Redwood looked back at the little figure standing by the railings, but did not stop.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Margaret Mellors’ doctor was in the area and tried to call on her patient for a second time late on Saturday morning. Monday was the deadline for the old dear to claim both her bed and her new life, otherwise she went back to the bottom of the queue. Looking through the kitchen window, the doctor could see a clean and tidy room, the fire not cleared and a knitting basket beside it. There was nothing in any of it to raise the slightest suspicion. Walking back out of the alley to her car, she met Sylvie and mother bound for the house she had just left, her attention drawn by the screaming child being tugged along like a reluctant bulldog, feet skidding, snarling between barks. It was a quiet sort of street, apart from that, the doctor reflected; a pity it was so close to the football stadium.

  ‘Excuse me, do you happen to know Mrs Mellors?’

  ‘Yes.’ The reply was tired, but affirmative. The child stopped making a noise and began to pick her nose.

  ‘Only I’ve been trying to get hold of her. Looks like she’s gone away, perhaps.’

  ‘She never goes away,’ said the mother in a voice flat with disappointment. ‘Never.’

  ‘Any idea where she might be then?’

  ‘Around here somewhere. She always is. Have you tried next door?’

  They looked at one another meaningfully.

  ‘She’s dead,’ the child piped up. ‘Dead and buried.’

  ‘That’s enough from you, thank you very much.’ The mother was apologetic, recognising a doctor, and suddenly chatty. ‘Sorry, she’s very morbid. We took her to a funeral, a big mistake.’

  ‘Oh, maybe not. Look, when did you see Mrs Mellors last?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ the child said. The mother turned to her.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No.’ Sylvie giggled.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the mother despairingly, in reference to what the doctor was not entirely sure. ‘Two days? Three days?’ Her brow cleared. ‘Before Mum’s funeral, she was fine then.’

  The doctor went back to her surgery after four more visits. Winter was a terrible time for death. From there she called the police.

  When Logo came home at about two, they were all over him like a rash, doubling up, he supposed, on him and football duty. There was that lippy little bastard with the hammer fists and the weak mouth, another callow youth and a big darkie. My, my, Margaret would have loved it, always had liked men, liked everyone, come to that. She would have adored a whole houseful to make tea for and feed home-made biscuits, might even have offered them one of her everlasting, ever-shapeless sweaters. He told them as much.

  PC Williams was twitching and eyeing him sideways, waiting for him to say something provocative and refer to the yellow tide-marks of his bruises, but the other two were as civil as the kind he usually encountered and Logo held his tongue. Acted as Mr Meek and Mild: no he didn’t know where she was, he wasn’t his n
eighbour’s keeper (the phrase was becoming tired), but he’d like to know, of course, if they should find out. She was a good old soul and they often called on one another, but no, not in the last day or so, he had to confess.

  ‘So your fingerprints would be in her kitchen, if we looked, would they?’ said Williams, tauntingly. Logo looked at him, all wide-eyed innocence.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I often brought in her coal.’

  They’d have a job finding cause for a search warrant. Old ladies were allowed to go on walkabout, just like young ones. The boys were only there with their bristling radios and razzamatazz to make sure she hadn’t fallen over in the bath. Once they’d heard how able-bodied she was, they didn’t seem to have much else to do now they’d shouldered down her door. There was very little damage, a skill they had. Logo helped them refix the lock and showed them where Margaret kept her spare key, like the fool she was, hanging on a piece of string inside the letter box. It made them feel idiots for all that wasted effort and not thinking first. I thought you learned things in training school, he told them, only you don’t know anything about the habits of the old. To compound his subtle insults, he waved them goodbye like passing royalty, hoping someone in the street would see he was on such friendly terms, like the actions of someone who really did help a neighbour with her knitting.

  But they would be back; it was obvious they would be back. They’d come back last time, like some recurrent disease, saying, Sorry to bother you, acting as if they were too, but that time he’d been crying all over the place, weeping his cotton socks off, crazy with agitation for the loss of his wife and daughter, and they really had been sorry for him then. Now he reckoned he had two lines of defence to stop them coming into his house, the first being that they wouldn’t like the smell of it (it was beginning to get that ammonia-tinged, fusty scent), any more than he liked theirs and the second was he could prevaricate as long as he wanted because there was nothing to hide. But he didn’t want that PC Williams and he didn’t want attention, and besides, he was really tired. The football crowd would imprison him indoors if he stayed with all their racket. The best thing to do would be to go away, just for the weekend. He knew where; like father, like daughter, he knew exactly where.

  I brought her up to be cunning, he said to himself sorrowfully, standing in the backyard; made her sly and fond of the dark and good at getting into things, clever with her hands. He sniggered loudly at that, still revelling in his triumph with the officers. Only once before had he encountered so many and not even been arrested. Oh Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do.

  Without the trolley, as he had discovered on recent perambulations, he was first without an alibi, second without ballast. He found himself swaying from side to side and not quite sure what to do with his hands. Today, he was restless after three steps, turned round, went back indoors and for some obscure reason, changed his clothes from one very dirty set to one less dirty. The black funeral jacket he had worn when he went to see Margaret last, a little grimy, not bad, but the lapels covered in white dust which seemed to have penetrated the lining with a sweet smell. Logo punched his chest and the powder billowed. He only tried that trick once. The trousers were cleanish jeans, the shirt he left as was, only worn three days in the last week, maybe it went with the jacket, he couldn’t remember. He liked both for the wafts of scent they sent over his head. Walking down the road in his training shoes, he buried his nose in his armpit and kept it there, nice. As well as the smell he carried a scarf and one of Margaret’s home-knit sweaters hung round his neck. The combined effect, along with his open donkey jacket, made him look and feel substantially fat, a man who ate well. That reminded him about bread being the staff of life, so he bought some and gnawed it out of a paper bag. Stopping at another shop for three bars of chocolate, he worked out that the lack of a good pie might explain why he was so twitchy. He’d given up going to the pubs since acquiring his bruises and even drink had lost its appeal.

  When he got there, though, after the long walk, he wished he’d bought some booze. He looked up and down and decided he liked the railings in particular. Shining black, a row of spears, including the gate he had discovered before, still to the touch, but movable, with an impressive padlock holding a chain so loosely his thin self could sidle through the gap. The well of the moat was slimy with water. In the shallow pools created by three days’ gusty rain, a pigeon bathed, cooing. ‘Shoo,’ he said, ‘fuck off, or I’ll sing to you,’ and as it struggled into flight with the grace of a slow torpedo, Logo felt beset, as he had all day, by the endless desire to laugh. He paddled through puddles underneath the steps to what looked like a grand entrance for trade, down the side. A delivery door, secure as the crown jewels, a window into the basement which was not. He knew all about offices, from having cleaned them. Inside, it was warm as toast.

  Rose was sorry in the morning, for having said so much. She woke up with a feeling of emotional indigestion, worse than any hangover she had ever known. A pint of wine hadn’t done this to Rose; she had coped with a pint of spirit before now, and last night’s ration had gone down like water, but it wasn’t right to talk so much and eat another person’s food. Not that she hadn’t talked to people before about her life; to do so was another clue to sanity, she’d found. But it had always been in dribs and drabs and mainly to strangers, because that was like talking to a wall; they wished you luck and you knew you’d never see them again. Anyway she’d never opened her big mouth as wide as this. Helen and she slept late; Rose had got up in the middle of the night to find all the lights still on, which was comforting, and had gone back to bed in Helen’s small and barred spare room, thinking, I could stay here for ever; it even beats the office for safety, but with daylight, it seemed less secure and her own position untenable. She might have gone before Helen was up if she had known how to unlock the door and her sense of shame had not frozen her will, and the boiler hadn’t twinked into life and made the place even cosier, so she stayed put.

  Helen had woken, coughing like a dead engine, wondering what Rose might think. She didn’t know what it was like to be sexually abused, but she did know what it was like to feel violent and she certainly knew the deep dark shame of telling.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, slumping at the kitchen table in a dressing gown which cheered Rose for its sheer age. Will you look at that thing, she was thinking; even her own was better, and she was up and dressed, far too wide awake for comfort, with that guarded look over her face like a visor. ‘Christ,’ Helen repeated, ‘I do feel ashamed of myself. Will you promise me, Rose, you’ll never repeat to anyone what I told you last night, all that stuff about fancying Dinsdale and my sex life before, during and after Bailey, and about being frightened of the dark? Promise? Blackmail me until the money runs out, could be soon, but don’t tell.’

  It was a bit of a comic turn with exaggerated gestures; Rose saw through it but smiled, the guarded look retreating. She has an extraordinary face, thought Helen; a face which turns from hunted to haunted to hard and insolent and then into the softest and most vulnerable beauty you ever saw. I wish I had a daughter. Looking at what had happened in the life of this mother’s child she thought again, perhaps not. Helen had often felt maternal, but it was mostly applied towards adults.

  ‘Instant coffee or the real knee-jerk variety? Got both, usually have the latter. We’ve got things to sort out.’

  Rose liked the briskness. It made her meek all over again.

  ‘We’ve got to go and get some clothes for you. I meant it about staying here, by the way, don’t think I was just being polite, so you need stuff, though you’re welcome to mine.’

  Rose looked at the dressing gown, like some sort of old carpet.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘And after that,’ Helen went on, ‘I thought we might go and see your adopted gran—’

  ‘No,’ said Rose, panicking. ‘He might be in. He’ll see us.’

  ‘So? I’m big and ugly. I bite people and�
�’

  ‘You don’t know how he hates me,’ Rose said. ‘You really don’t.’ She was aware now how ridiculous it seemed in the cold light of day to harbour such fantasies of persecution, for which she could produce so little evidence. It was ludicrous to expect anyone else to accept that one small man could loom so large and be everywhere at the same time.

  ‘All right,’ said Helen, ‘we’ll drive. Cruise by.’ Nobody cruises by in your car, Rose thought, specially not the way you drive it. ‘You can duck down and tell me what to look for.’

  That was better. ‘Do you think,’ Helen continued, ‘you could speak his name? I mean his surname? You haven’t told me that.’

  ‘Darvey,’ Rose muttered.

  ‘It isn’t Darvey. I know Darvey isn’t your real name. Don’t ask me why I know, but I know. You just don’t answer to Darvey easily enough. I bet you’ve got a really silly name, as silly as Dinsdale’s. You just want to keep it secret.’ She was making toast in that horrible dressing gown, busying herself.

  Oh why couldn’t she guess? She’d had enough clues.

  ‘My mother’s name,’ Rose snapped. ‘She used to call me Rose and her name was Darvey.’

  ‘Which brings us,’ said Helen, pouring coffee, ‘to the vital point. We want to find your mum. We want your father rendered harmless.’

  Oh, help me, Rose thought. Could no-one ever understand how her own father could never be rendered thus? And would Helen never see, without actually being told, how it was that the idea of her father being punished or imprisoned was not pleasant either? So what if the talk last night had all been about hatred and fear and hunting, it had still failed to include all the sneaking parts, the dreadful bond of blood which even while fearing him did not want him tortured either and could not abide him covered in bruises. That was what she was afraid to admit.

  ‘So,’ Helen was continuing with the same briskness, ‘I think that means we should go to the police and get the whole thing looked at again. To find out what went on, where your mum went. And report your father.’