Oh Marina Girl

by Graham Lironi

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed.

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘The truth,’ I said, raising my right hand with mock solemnity. ‘This is mine oath. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’

  ‘D’you believe in God?’

  ‘D’you believe in truth?’

  ‘I see your trait’s still intact.’

  The waitress served our coffees. When she’d departed I finally confessed that both Ian Thome and Tom Haine were pseudonyms deployed by me. Pardos didn’t seem at all surprised.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?’ she asked.

  ‘I felt it was my responsibility — and mine alone — to try to resolve the situation I’d inadvertently created — ’

  ‘ — You wanted to cover your tracks before you were caught and had to face the consequences,’ she interrupted, savaging me with unanticipated disdain. Her tone revealed the cordiality of the day before as no more than a tactic in a strategy designed to deceive me into considering her an ally. I shuddered at the ease with which I’d fallen for her ploy.

  ‘Why write under a pseudonym anyway?’ she asked. ‘Were you ashamed of what you’d written?’

  ‘Why should I be ashamed? Yesterday you said you were captivated by it.’

  ‘I said a lot of things yesterday,’ she said, confirming that the charade of cordiality was over. ‘Its title is, of course, an anagram of your name; can I take it that, since it’s also written in the first person, the views voiced by the narrator are your own?’

  ‘You can take it any way you want.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you how I took it,’ she said. ‘I found its focus on logical analyses and its neglect of emotional concerns offensive. I thought it was written from a detached, hypothetical moral perspective untainted by the gory trauma of the close-up reality. I thought it failed to convey any real sense of the depth of the dilemma because it was written by someone who has never, and will never, have to confront that dilemma.’

  Whilst I was wounded by the severity of her unexpected criticism, and suspected that it had been partly motivated by her own experience of the dilemma in question, I was more intrigued by its ring of familiarity.

  ‘You sound just like Niamh — ’

  ‘ — You’re not the only one who can adopt pseudonyms,’ she interrupted.

  ‘You mean you’re ... then who was the girl in the library?’

  ‘A colleague.’

  ‘But why would you — ’

  ‘ — Let me spell it out for you,’ she sighed, lighting a cigarette (I never knew she smoked, but then I never really knew her, did I?). ‘The only lead in the unresolved Craig Liddell case was the name left in the hotel register — ’

  ‘ — Toni Mahe,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Having wasted countless hours on fruitless research,’ she continued as if she hadn’t heard me, ‘I’d eventually concluded that the name was fictitious, but significant — because of its very fictitiousness (no one would deliberately leave a randomly chosen name at a murder scene). I became convinced that the key to solving the case would only be found once I understood the significance of the pseudonym. It didn’t take long from there to decipher the fact that the name was an anagram of “I am not he”. At one point I took this literally and thought that this might be a clue to the sex of the murderer, but I later reverted to my original interpretation; that it was a way of confirming that the name Toni Mahe was a pseudonym. So — ’

  ‘ — So you kept a look out for other pseudonyms which were variations of the “I am not he” anagram,’ I interrupted. ‘And when I published Original Harm under the pseudonym Tom Haine, you thought you might be on to something. Correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And so — let me guess — you planted a scathing review under the pseudonym Niamh Toe to provoke a reaction from the murderer, in the hope that the recognition of your pseudonym would intrigue him. Correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And, correct me if I’m wrong, when I then responded to your review using the pseudonym Ian Thome, you became convinced you’d found your man. Correct?’

  ‘You’re more astute than I gave you credit for,’ she said.

  ‘And when that response resulted in a kidnapping, all your suspicions were confirmed. Was I the prime suspect?’

  ‘You were a suspect’

  ‘I’m not anymore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re not murderer material,’ she said, in a way that made it sound like an insult.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why not.’ I wasn’t at all sure that I did, but chose not to pursue the matter further.

  ‘And yesterday, when you said that you’d been in touch with the publisher, Tina Home, that was a fishing expedition designed to prompt my admission that I’d written and published Original Harm myself, correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘I want you to tell me everything you know about The Amino,’ she said.

  ‘They’re fictional,’ I replied.

  ‘They’re a fact,’ she insisted. ‘And you christened them.’

  ‘As far as I’m aware they exist only within the pages of Original Harm.’

  ‘If only that were true,’ she sighed. ‘But we know that the kidnapper, whoever he is, is a member. We also know that you invented their ideology. How d’you explain that?’

  I shrugged and said, ‘Sometimes life imitates art.’

  ‘Now where have I heard that before?’ she answered, feigning forgetfulness. ‘Oh yes, the kidnapper deposited that little cliché inside yesterday’s jewellery box.’

  ‘That’s just a coincidence.’

  ‘I thought I’d already told you — I don’t believe in coincidences.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.’

  She sighed.

  ‘D’you think Ian Thome’s kidnapper killed Craig Liddell?’ I asked.

  ‘Yesterday you told me you’d no kids,’ she said, ignoring my question.

  ‘I didn’t tell you anything,’ I corrected, ‘I shook my head.’

  ‘But you have a son.’

  ‘Had. He’s dead.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  This question reinforced my growing inkling that the tragedy I’d long since resigned myself to accept as incontrovertible fact, might not be true, and that my fantasy (that — somehow, someday — the incontrovertible fact would be revealed to have been founded upon a series of erroneous assumptions by a simple explanation for Will’s disappearance which, once it had been uttered, seemed perfectly plausible so that I wondered why it had never occurred to me before) might well be true.

  The waitress removed our empty coffee cups with a clumsy clatter and a wipe of the tabletop as Pardos sought to second-guess my thoughts.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ I said, all trace of irony drained from my tone. She changed the topic, prolonging my suffocation.

  ‘Does anyone else know about your deployment of pseudonyms?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that I know of — apart from Chris.’

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘The Crossword Compiler — but he’s not the kidnapper, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘You know that for a fact?’

  I took a deep breath and it occurred to me that Pardos thought I was shielding his identity from her.

  ‘As good as,’ I said.

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  ‘Think carefully now. We don’t have much time.’

  I hesitated a moment before answering, weighing up the pros and cons of revealing the kidnapper’s demand that I meet him at the flagpol
e at noon before deciding, finally, to keep schtum for now.

  ‘For the past decade I’ve had way too much,’ I said, glancing at my watch. It was 11:45am. ‘Now I don’t have enough.’

  I rose to leave then hesitated once more. There were a thousand things I wanted to say to her but didn’t know how or where to begin.

  part five

  i’m on heat

  chapter twenty

  the present tense

  It was probably the glimpse Pardos caught of me hailing down a taxi that alerted her to the fact that something was afoot but by then it was already too late for her to attempt to follow me so, instead — and I only discovered this when I read about it later in an extended article by-lined to Dick and Hill — she hailed her own taxi and directed it to my home address where she searched my flat for clues to the identity of the kidnapper.

  Just how she gained entry, given that there was no evidence of any force having been used, I don’t know. And just how she deduced that any such clues might be gleaned from a cursory examination of my flat I’m not sure either, but I suspect that proficiency in deduction was a fundamental requirement of her occupation and she no doubt had an array of skills and techniques unknown to me at her disposal.

  Certainly on this occasion her deduction had proved to be accurate. Pardos had discovered an abundance of clues, including a manuscript of Original Harm. Of more interest to her, though, were the two letters I’d reread in the pre-dawn hours of that same day, searching desperately for clues; together with a pile of letters she discovered stacked randomly on my bookshelf from a long extinguished epistolary friendship which (she deduced from their quantity) spanned an extensive period.

  It was then that her ever-dependable hunch, that sixth sense required by all detectives, private or otherwise, if they ever hope to bring a case to a satisfactory conclusion, made its presence felt and Pardos sensed that the solution to uncovering the identity of the kidnapper lay somewhere in this unsorted stack of letters. Whilst her instinct was to file them according to their dates, so that she could examine them sequentially, she found herself distracted by a compelling sense of urgency so that, whilst seeking to establish some semblance of chronological order to the correspondence, she stole intermittent glances at certain passages of various letters out of sequence if the subject matter intrigued her sufficiently.

  In one letter, written in the handwriting of a child still endeavouring to master the art of the written word, Pardos found herself captivated by the unbridled excitement of its juvenile author enthusing about Alice in Wonderland. In the very next letter she read (surely not coincidentally), an adult hand extolled the virtues of Crime and Punishment with an equally eager conviction that seemed almost childlike in its lack of cynicism. Their dates revealed that the second letter had been penned nearly a decade after the first and their signatures (although differing superficially as a consequence of substantially improved handwriting skills over the intervening years) revealed that both letters had been penned by the same hand.

  As Pardos became immersed in the multitude of letters rhapsodising about a variety of subjects — TV programmes, music and books, lots of books — she soon found herself to be infected by the contagious joie de vivre that characterised the correspondence. Reading the letters rekindled in her a capacity for enchantment. But no sooner had this capacity begun to warm her than it was extinguished once and for all by a gust of suspicion that swept her from her reverie back to the present tense. The catalyst of extinction was the mid-section of a letter untainted by the pervasive naivety, striking, instead, a sour note. As ever, I’ll reproduce it for you verbatim:

  … because the fact of the matter is that I understand the way Tom Sawyer thinks about things better than I understand anyone else I know — including you. I thought I knew you. I thought you knew me. But when I read what you thought of my novel A Halo Ring Rim I realised that neither of us had ever really known the other.

  I know it would be pointless to try to counter your criticisms (except to say that the eyeball-slitting scene was intended as an homage to, not a ‘rip-off’ of, Buñuel, just as the molar cufflinks were intended as an allusion to, rather than a ‘parodic travesty’ of, Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfshiem) because I know that all you did was tell me what you really thought and that I can ask you for no more.

  It was then that her gaze fell upon the bookshelf where the very journal you’re reading now lay open at its last entry — the events described a few pages back — my meeting with Mark Twain, my dream about Will and my comparing of Will’s last letter with the kidnapper’s.

  As soon as she finished reading this last entry, Pardos rushed from the flat and sprinted to Queen’s Park as fast as she could.

  chapter twenty-one

  her word against mine

  It was en route to my rendezvous with the kidnapper as I sat wringing my hands in the back seat of the taxi that I realised that the flicker of hope I’d dared not permit myself to contemplate all those years, yet had proven so resolutely inextinguishable, had finally been fulfilled: Will was alive. I could feel it. He might be a kidnapper (if so, there had to be extenuating circumstances) but he was my son and he was alive and I was about to be reunited with him after all these long, drawn-out years.

  As I speculated on just how this miracle of resurrection had come to pass, the scenario I sketched assumed the following indefinite shape: grief-stricken at the untimely demise of his mother, Will had instinctively sought to apportion blame. I remember reading an article in the paper by a renowned psychiatrist explaining that such a response was to be expected as it provided the bereaved with a convenient fall-guy towards which they could direct the full vent of their remorse. It is a recognised way of coping with the shock of bereavement and, in most cases, over time, the need to apportion blame will subside alongside the shock until the stark fact of death is assimilated and there is an acceptance that no amount of blame apportionment will alter that fact. No doubt Will blamed me for Lisa’s death. Given the circumstances — I was convenient and there was really no one else in the frame — I suppose this was to be expected. What was perhaps unexpected was that, instead of affording his grievance the time and space to subside and learning to reconcile himself to the fact of his mother’s death, Will had acted on it immediately (perhaps this reaction too should have been anticipated, given his tender years — he was only seven at the time — which must have made his grief seem unbearable) and sought, instead, to avenge her and exact revenge upon me by faking his own death; an action which must have provided him with an instant outlet for his grief and displaced it on to me. And if Will had blamed me then, in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, had he nurtured his hate for me throughout the duration of his formative years, waiting for the right time to exact his revenge? And if so, then what was it about now that made it the right time? Could it be connected to the publication of Original Harm?

  What if Lisa had indoctrinated Will’s malleable young mind with poisonous lies about me? Lies? What lies? And why would she do such a thing? Perhaps she had acted on a notion that she had a duty to inform her son of the truth — she had always felt the need to confess, even when it seemed obvious that only harm could ever come from a particular confession — whatever she considered the truth to be. For Lisa the truth was absolute, whereas I constantly questioned her conception of it and disputed her version of it. For me, the truth depended on which particular version of it you chose to believe, by which I mean that it could be reduced to a question of favouring one person’s word over another’s.

  And then it hit me. Of course! It seemed so obvious now! Everything fell into place. I knew exactly the ‘truth’ Lisa had spoon-fed Will and I could pinpoint the precise time and location of her premeditated poisoning of his notion of me only all too clearly.

  It would have been during the afternoon of the day of her death in Majorca that she’d have decided to confess the events of Wi
ll’s conception to him. It’s only now that I can begin to realise the significance of that afternoon (given the subsequent events of that day, it is perhaps understandable that I should have overlooked it). Sprawled out on Port de Soller’s Repic beach, Lisa sat tucked away beneath the shade of an umbrella, with us but apart, under duress and no doubt seething at me for insisting that she spend some time with her family, engrossed in The Story of O, myself stealing glances at a topless trio of frolicking Fräuleins tossing a Day-Glo yellow frisbee to and fro amidst the surf, when Will stopped patting his sandcastle with the back of his spade to interrupt the silence with one of his queries. Where, he wondered, apropos of nothing in particular — perhaps a toddler had tottered past, or a sun-stroked baby had squawked for some of its mother’s milk — did babies come from? For once I’d forsaken my parental duties by opting to escape for a refreshing dip in the sea, leaving Lisa to answer his enquiry. It was then, I realise now, that she had chosen to poison him with her version of the truth.

  Lisa was adamant that, without exception, truth was the best policy. The notion that it might be in Will’s best interests if she were to censor any aspect of the truth would not have occurred to her. Lisa would regard such censorship as an ill-conceived allowance made for juvenile sensibilities and a serious dereliction of her duty. Of this I was certain. In all matters, Lisa addressed Will as an equal. No doubt my flight from Will’s enquiry would have infuriated her. I’m sure that, whilst I was busy bathing in the Mediterranean, Lisa was giving Will a graphic account of the act of his conception and sparing him no blushes.

  ‘You were born as a result of your dad raping me,’ she would have said, matter-of-factly.

  She always dropped her bombshells that way, as if she was making small talk and her revelations were no more provocative than everyday observations about the weather. It was as though she set out to pre-empt and undermine the anticipated shocked response from the recipients of her surprises so that her deadpan delivery led them to question the appropriateness of such a reaction. That’s how she would have told Will. I can hear her voice.