The Smog (A Jean Clarke Mystery Book 1)

by Timothy Allsop

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Arthur was standing behind her.

  ‘I was…’

  ‘You shouldn’t be in here.’

  ‘Your mother needs some water.’

  ‘Well the tap is in the kitchen. Give us that,’ Arthur said, sharply, taking the glass from her hand.

  Jean followed him and stood at the kitchen door as he filled up the glass. She could see the pig laid out on the kitchen table. Arthur pushed passed her and went through to the front room. She moved back to the front room and watched as Arthur held the glass for his mother so she could have a few sips. He would not look at Jean and she could feel the anger radiating off him. Charlie returned with a bucket of coal and told Arthur to prepare a fire.

  ‘Shall we get you home?’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ Jean said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than sit around with us,’ and before Jean could answer he turned to his brother.

  ‘Arthur, will you fetch mum a cuppa and make sure that fire stays lit.’

  ‘Don’t go out again.’

  ‘I got to.’

  ‘How long will you be?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  Arthur cut Jean a sly glance.

  ‘Sorry to have troubled you all,’ Jean said, ‘I hope you have a very pleasant Christmas.’

  ‘They’ll be no Christmas this year,’ his mother said, before breaking out into another round of coughing.

  ‘Now don’t be so miserable mum. We always do a good Christmas lunch. You should see how much meat we got now. I’ll do you pork chops for lunch tomorrow.’

  His mother didn’t answer.

  There was a knock at the door. Arthur became rigid, his eyes flicking to Charlie.

  ‘You expecting anyone?’ Charlie said in a whisper.

  ‘Of course not,’ his brother answered, putting his finger to his lip to make the boy quiet.

  Charlie stood for a moment and listened. There was another knock at the door. He went into the hall and asked who was there. A man’s voice answered. Charlie came back and pulled the living room door almost closed and then went back to the front door. Jean heard him open the latch and speak to someone, but it was difficult to make out most of what was being said. Something about an angel and tomorrow at one? Jean could see that whoever it was, they had set both Arthur and his mother on edge. They were listening as intently as she was. The door shut and Charlie came back in.

  ‘You’re coming straight back?’ Arthur said, as soon as he walked into the front room.

  ‘I’ll be an hour, all right?’

  Arthur sat down on a chair and kicked off his shoes. Jean looked down at his feet and saw two of his toes sticking out of his left sock. He saw her looking and moved his feet under the chair, his face turning red.

  ‘Right Jean, we better get on.’

  ‘Bye then,’ Jean said to Arthur and his mother but neither of them replied, both staring sourly at her.

  Charlie led Jean into the dark of the night and they began to walk. For a long while neither of them spoke. She looked up in the hope of seeing the stars, but the smog continued in its conquest, steady and ceaseless. Coal dust had succeeded in clotting up the night and what with the extreme cold, the fires of every home would continue to burn making the smog thicker still. Everything was equally drenched in soot and as a result the buildings, trees and people could claim no definite shape; one thing blurred into the next, all movement slurred and everything was coloured in a single shade of yellow phlegm.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I can’t seem to get warm.’

  ‘I’m sorry our place was in such a state. It’s not usually as bad as all that. It’s just we’re expecting to be moved out to one of the new housing estates.’

  ‘You’re moving?’

  ‘Not till the New Year. You know what it’s like with the planning and building boys. Things always take longer than expected.’

  ‘Where are you moving to?’

  ‘We settled on Harlow. That’s if we get enough money together.’

  ‘You don’t sound very happy about it.’

  ‘I’m only moving for mother’s sake. She can’t keep going in that place much longer.’

  They passed by a pub on the corner of a road. Jean could hear laughter and chatter coming from inside. Charlie glanced through one of the windows but kept moving. She looked up at the pub and caught a glimpse of the sign: The Angel. That was what he had been talking about with whoever was at the door.

  ‘You’ll be all right from here?’ Charlie asked, after a few more minutes of walking. ‘The station is about fifty yards ahead on your left.’

  He gave an apprehensive look in the direction of the station.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jean asked.

  ‘I won’t come any further if that’s all right?’ He stopped with an awkward cough and then continued, ‘That’s where my father was killed.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘There was a stampede at Bethnal Green underground during the war. He was caught up in the stampede. No bloody dignity in it. It ruined mother. We all take the buses now if we have to use public transport.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well the past is past and all that. He’s buried up in Homerton. I take mother to see him once a week. He’s got a big old slab with his name on it. Don’t like going myself. When I go I’m going to be cremated. I want nothing left of me. No damn statues for people to waste their lives mourning over.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘It’s very good of you to see me back.’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘And if you hear anything, please do let us know. We are at thirty-four Prince of Wales Street, the basement flat. Or call the police. They’ve been informed of the disappearance.’

  ‘Right, I’ll keep my ears open.’

  Jean could tell that he was being polite and had no intention of keeping his ears open. They stood for a moment in silence not quite knowing how to part.

  ‘You don’t have another cigarette, do you?’ Jean asked.

  Charlie smiled and took out a box from his jacket pocket. She took it and let him light it for her. He lit one for himself. A strange feeling passed over Jean. She had no real desire to go back to her brother’s flat. It was fun to stand outside and smoke. She liked Charlie too although she knew he was hiding something in regard to Phyllis. She had asked for a cigarette partly to satisfy a suspicion she’d had, which was that Charlie smoked the same brand as Harry and Phyllis. There had also been the lady’s clothes in the upstairs bedroom, too new to belong to the mother. Perhaps Charlie was Phyllis’s lover. It wasn’t such a wild thought to conceive that Phyllis might be drawn to a man like Charlie. If anything they were far more suited to one another. She felt a tingle of excitement in trying to piece it together.

  ‘Well I best be off,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I won’t give up looking for her,’ Jean said, suddenly assured and safe in the knowledge she would see Charlie again. ‘Even if she has left my brother, I want to know the reason why.’

  ‘Perhaps she had to get away.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘People do the best they can but sometimes you don’t have a choice in things. Anyway, I’ll be seeing you. If I were you, I’d look after yourself and keep out of this filthy air.’

  Charlie began to move away. Jean watched as he turned and disappeared into the fog. She stood for a moment looking down at the dregs of her cigarette and in its small fierce glow she saw her anguish pulsing, the furious grief in her stomach that felt so dreadfully permanent. She flicked the cigarette into the street and then lifted her hand to her face, eyeing her ring finger. There was still a faint mark where the wedding band had pinched her skin. She would not put it back on.

  She had to find Phyllis. Her own fate now felt bound up with that of her sister-in-law. They were both of
them on the run and they were both in a sense lost. As she descended the steps into the station she began to think of all the layers of city beneath her feet, the dank soil thick with mortar and bones from previous centuries. It overwhelmed her to think of all those people, now long dead, and all the mistakes they made.

  SIX

  Jean was the first to arrive back at Harry’s flat at a little after ten in the evening. She switched on the lights and pulled the drapes across the windows. She turned and surveyed the living room. The clarity and sharp definition of every object was too much to take in. What a mess it seemed, all these possessions crafted and collected together, almost farcically real. And what secrets of Harry’s were they concealing? She knew she had to work quickly because her brother could return at any moment.

  Without removing her coat she went over to the mantle above the fireplace, picked out the key to his bureau from the little grey pot and went over and unlocked it. There were three wooden drawers set into the back of the bureau. Her gaze hovered for a moment over the blue leather inlay on which she imagined Harry had written out all kinds of dull accounting slips. The dyed skin was beautiful with its endless imperfections and she let her hand run over it. It maddened her with desire for something living, and she felt her own body surging with power but with no real way to dissipate it. She turned her attention back to the drawers, opening one at a time, carefully observing the arrangement of papers and documents so that she could replace them exactly as she had found them. There was nothing new to this kind of careful snooping. She spent several months prying through Frank’s papers. She believed he was having an affair, yet she discovered no proof and, in truth, she knew her concerns were more likely the result of hours of boredom from being confined to her bedroom. She spent much of her time rifling through all of Frank’s belongings and putting together a picture of her husband’s life. He never talked about his money and yet she knew he had three accounts and knew precisely how much was in each of them. The details of his insurance, his case files and even his letters were known to her. She would test him by asking indirectly about a friend from one of his letters or about a case, trying to catch him out and prove him a liar, but the difficulty was he spoke so amorphously about everything that he was impossible to pin down. It annoyed her that her brother seemed to be exactly the same. She half suspected they were in collusion and that she would now find evidence of her husband’s indiscretions in her brother’s documents. It made her laugh to think her father had described Frank as a straightforward, plain-speaking man. If men were simple upfront people, it was only because they were so good at forgetting their own secrets.

  It was obvious from the piles of paper in front of her that Harry was a hoarder but then she knew that from childhood. He collected anything and everything. Some of them were the usual things that fascinated boys, like stamps and coins, but she remembered he developed a need to collect the Sunday papers for a while. His room was always packed with things, but it was never in what could be described as a mess. He ordered and classified all of his collections and put everything in its place.

  She removed the papers and documents in sections, thumbing through each piece. It was not entirely clear to her what she was looking for, but she believed she would know when she had found it. She looked through his bankbooks, envying his ability to earn money and, seeing the amounts, she believed she would have done a better job at spending it too. Looking around the flat, it seemed he lived a frugal day-to-day existence but then perhaps he spent his earnings on Phyllis. What was it about this girl that attracted him so? Perhaps it was nothing more than the way she looked. It felt so unjust that girls like Phyllis could take what they wanted simply because they had a good pair of legs and faultless skin. It felt a great disservice to the vast majority of women.

  There was nothing of any note in the bureau and so she closed it up. She searched another cabinet and the dresser where she found the half bottle of scotch from which Harry had slugged earlier that evening, and nestled just behind it was another unopened bottle of the same stuff and a smaller bottle of gin.

  Then it came to her that Harry probably kept truly important things in his bedroom. She moved up to the first floor and was happy to find his bedroom door ajar because it made entering his room seem less of an intrusion. As soon as she walked in she could smell the familiar solemn scent of her brother, a combination of old books and his body odour. She switched on the light to find an unmade bed. There was a small chest of drawers, a wardrobe against one wall and a small armchair in the corner by the window with some of Harry’s clothes slung over the back. Next to the fireplace crucified on a towel rail was a white shirt which had been laid out to dry, but the object which drew her attention was a large painting above the bed of a man standing on a beach looking out to sea, his torso bare and his back turned to the viewer. It was a simple painting in broad colours but Jean was captivated by the elegance of the man’s back and the muscular complexity of his shoulder blades.

  But then she remembered that she did not have time to waste and knelt down to look beneath the bed but all she found was an old rug rolled up and two pairs of Harry’s shoes with shoe trees holding them in shape. The top drawer of the chest was filled with socks, braces and ties neatly arranged and then in the second she found a couple of pairs of ladies tights and women’s undergarments. The discovery made her stop. She realized she had already found what she was looking for. Leaving the drawer open she unlatched the wardrobe and there hanging up next to all of Harry’s jackets were two dresses, a skirt, and a single pair of brown court shoes on the floor. That was the meagre extent of Phyllis’s belongings. Her absence was so plain to see when she looked at all the accoutrements of Harry’s life. Phyllis was his wife and yet there was barely a mark of her presence, nothing that suggested she had made this her home. Something had clearly gone wrong with their relationship long before she went missing.

  Jean lifted out one of the dresses and held it up to her body. It was an elegant crepe dark-green dress, which came to just below her knee. She could tell by looking at the waist that it was a little too small for her but she still wanted to try it on. Moving quickly she kicked off her shoes while unzipping her own drab brown jacket and skirt and slipped Phyllis’s dress on and stood looking into a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. It was the first time she had looked at herself properly since leaving the hospital and it was hard to accept the image in front of her. The dress pinched in at the waist and she could see the loose skin of her belly push slightly against the crepe, unnoticeable to anyone but her. What was most shocking was the way her face had aged in a matter of a few weeks. She wanted to turn away but she forced herself to keep looking. How she envied Phyllis’s ability to disappear. It was surely only a matter of time before she had to face up to what had happened and resolve some way forward with Frank but it made her sick to even think about it. She could hear him now with that grim voice of reassurance.

  *

  ‘We’ll be all right this time my dear,’ Frank said.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Jean said. ‘How can you know that?’

  Frank put his hand on her arm.

  ‘It happens to a lot of women the first time,’ the doctor said.

  It had been eight months since the miscarriage and there she was again, nearly four years into her marriage, with an opportunity to give her husband the baby he desperately wanted. His enthusiasm was so strong that she often believed he wanted to conceive himself. Perhaps it would have been better for both of them had they exchanged bodies but then she couldn’t imagine Frank ever being a particularly useful or attractive woman. He did not have the patience or selflessness required.

  ‘I’d like us to follow the doctor’s advice this time,’ he said, with only the hint of an accusation.

  ‘So I would essentially have to stay in bed for the entire term?’ Jean asked, looking directly at the doctor.

  The doctor smiled kindly which upset her because she knew she was b
eing coerced into something that required her to give up her life for the best part of a year. She wondered if a female doctor would have been able to smile while asking her to do the same thing.

  ‘It is the only decent suggestion I have to offer. It has worked with other patients and considering the infrequency with which you conceive I believe we should take the opportunity and make the best of it. You were nearly four months gone when you lost your first?’ the doctor said, looking over his notes.

  ‘A lot had been going on. My father passed away and we had just moved house,’ Jean said, by way of explanation.

  Frank patted her shoulder.

  ‘You were close to your father?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I was. He was sick most of the time and I helped mother to take care of him. My brother was away fighting and then moved to London.’

  ‘You and your brother get along well?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘We don’t really see much of him,’ Frank jumped in. ‘Lives a bit of a bohemian existence, I believe.’

  ‘How would you know? We never visit.’

  ‘Well he never visits us.’

  ‘But your mother is around?’ the doctor interrupted. ‘It’s just that you will need company through this process. It is no easy thing to be housebound and probably bedbound for three or four months. It would be good to have regular company,’ the doctor advised.

  She was glad to hear the doctor being more upfront with her.

  ‘I will take care of her,’ Frank said.

  ‘Well it really is a matter of keeping your movements to a minimum and bed rest as much as possible. I will also give you a list of the foods I’d like you to eat. I will come to the house every two weeks to check how things are progressing. We’re at three months now so if we can get through the next three I think we should be safe. As far as I can see all is well with the baby. We’ll do this together,’ the doctor said, with what was supposed to be a reassuring smile, but Jean was already terrified.