‘Right. I’ll accept that. Now, how did you feel when you first noticed him watching you?’
‘Feel? What you’d expect. Shocked. Angry. Sick. Sad.’
‘And the other women?’
‘Much the same, I expect.’
‘Angry?’
‘Yes, of course. You can’t help it.’
‘Did they express their anger in any way?’
‘Just the usual things. You know. What ought to be done to people like that. Teaching them a lesson and so on.’
Poppy paused. The image of Big Sue’s face came to her, just after the man had left, in the brilliant sunlight, the sense of primal female rage, ungovernable.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘It was just talk. You know how people’s minds work I mean, I’m against capital punishment but I remember thinking … I couldn’t stop myself …’
‘There was talk of catching him and teaching him a lesson?’
‘Well, yes, but …’
‘Killing him?
‘I suppose so. I tell you it was only talk.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You tell me.’
She stared at him and he gazed enquiringly back. His tanned, finely wrinkled face was solemn but unreadable.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember. I’m not going to say. You can’t make me. I know they didn’t mean anything. They aren’t like that.’
‘This is a murder investigation, Mrs Tasker. A man has been killed in a manner that links him to the play centre, and also suggests disapproval of his sexual activities. This is a line of enquiry I am forced to pursue, if only to eliminate it. You understand?’
‘Can I go now, please?’
Without waiting for an answer she turned and walked down the path. Jim was there, waiting for his interview, but stood out of her way without a word. Her face seemed to have set like plaster. She could think of nothing but getting away. The WPC’s neat bum protruded from the barrel to a fusillade from the cameras. Poppy tapped her on the spine and she backed out, her face pink with the posture and embarrassment and puffing on her whistle.
‘Thank you very much,’ Poppy managed to mutter. ‘You’ve been a great help. Come on, darling. Home now.’
She tugged the barrel clear. Outraged, Toby seized the other rim and tried to pull it back.
‘More eek!’ he demanded.
‘Not now, darling. Home.’
He clung to the rim, wrestling to free himself as she snatched him up. Then somehow he must have sensed that the rules had altered, felt the tension in her body, perhaps, understood with near-animal instinct that this was a time for stillness, for silence. They must know about danger, children. Deep in their genes there must be mechanisms that can feel the adult terror. Poppy hugged him to her, thankful to have him so close as she headed for the gate.
Sue had the push-chair ready—she must have got someone else to take charge of Denny. She didn’t ask any questions.
Men with notebooks and microphones jostled near by, but the police held them back. Toby made no attempt to resist as she strapped him into the push-chair—normally he would have insisted on walking at least as far as the ducks. People were shouting to her, questions, her name, what she’d seen. Their voices were wind in the trees, meaningless. She pushed the pram clear of the crowd but was aware of still being followed. A hand touched her arm.
‘Please go away,’ she said.
It was Sergeant Osborne.
‘Please go away,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Inspector says to take you home in a car. You’ll be followed everywhere, else.’
Poppy pushed on several more strides before she could take in the sense of it. A car, enclosing glass and steel, refuge. She let herself be guided back past the crowd to the west gate of the park. Several police cars were waiting there. She unstrapped Toby and lifted him clear.
‘You’ll have to let me show you how the push-chair folds,’ she said.
‘I’ll manage, love,’ said the driver. ‘Mothercare, isn’t it? Got one like that for my own little girl.’
She climbed into the back seat and sat with Toby in her lap. He too seemed to feel the relief of being sealed off from the horror in the park, closed round, safe, and as soon as the car moved off he wanted to explore. Of course he’d seldom been in a moving car before without being strapped into a baby-chair, and now could see no reason why he shouldn’t use his freedom to help the driver in his interesting activities. Poppy shoved him up on to her shoulder to watch the road dwindling away behind. That distracted him for the moment. Sergeant Osborne was also looking out of the rear window.
‘You’re clear, Mike, I think,’ she said. ‘Back to your daughter-in-law’s, Mrs Tasker?’
‘Yes, please. Oh. I wonder if we hadn’t better go to my flat. I don’t want all those people knowing where Toby lives.’
‘I’m afraid you’re in for that, whatever. This is the kind of case the papers really get hooked on—they’ll be at you over and over the next few days. Maybe you’d better have a social worker, help take a bit of the heat off.’
‘But surely when they realise I’m not going to say anything …’
‘Depends what else they’re getting.’
‘All I know just now is I want to be alone. My daughter-in-law’s a social worker—not that sort, but she’ll know. I’ll talk to her. So don’t do anything about it for the moment anyway, please.’
‘If that’s how you want it.’
The driver chose an indirect route, presumably to discourage anyone else who might be trying to follow them, so the journey home took long enough for Poppy to have pulled herself together and be able to say thank you in a normal voice. Once inside the flat she put a kettle on, gave herself a slug of gin in a coffee cup while she was waiting for it to boil, made a pot of strong tea and rang Janet.
‘You want me to come home?’
‘I can manage, I think.’
‘I’ll be about forty minutes.’
‘You’re wonderful.’
Toby meanwhile had been trying to interest Elias in building a ramp of cushions up to the sofa and then rolling down them. Elias was unresponsive. He had never in any case been able to see the slightest reason why Toby should occupy a space in the universe. Poppy’s impulse was to give herself another big slug of gin and then sit on the sofa hugging Toby to her and rocking to and fro while she wept over the beastliness of things. Instead she took him into the kitchen, half filled the washing-up bowl and put it on the floor, and settled down to play water games with some yoghurt pots, the kitchen funnel and the bulb-baster until Janet arrived.
2
Poppy was listening to Rosenkavalier when the doorbell rang again. Another reporter, she assumed. She’d had several telephone calls and then unplugged the cord, and had turned two separate men and a woman away from the door, telling all of them that she wasn’t going to say anything. She opened the door the couple of inches the chain allowed.
‘Who is that?’
‘Jim Bowles. Just come round to see you’re all right.’
She opened the door.
‘How very kind of you. Come in.’
‘More caterwauling,’ he remarked as he followed her into the living-room. She spun round.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped.
‘No call taking offence, Poppy. Just my way of saying it’s not my type of music.’
‘You’re still being stupid. Listen! Can’t you hear? Her lover’s there and she knows she’s getting too old for him. She’s singing about time. She’s telling him how she gets up at night and stops the clocks. Oh, please listen, Jim! For God’s sake, you might at least try!’
She turned the volume up and filled the room with the voice and the leaf-fall comments of
the orchestra. She stood by the fire with her arm along the mantelpiece and didn’t look at him until the aria ended. Then she switched the player off.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ she said.
‘You aren’t too old, Poppy. My eye, you’re a fetching woman.’
‘Thank you, but it isn’t about me. Not just me. Everything. It makes you share the sense of everything getting old and worn and lost and forgotten. Names on gravestones nobody will ever be able to read again. Bones under moors. That young man we saw this morning, he was a baby like Toby once. Somebody thought he was the loveliest thing that had ever happened.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t. Or maybe they tried to love him too hard, him turning out how he did.’
‘It was the same man, wasn’t it? You remember, the one who followed us that day?’
‘I’d say so. Tricky without the beard.’
‘Do they know who he was yet?’
‘Not as I heard. Not local. Nothing on him barring a return ticket to Mitcham.’
‘Nothing? No money? No cigarettes? He pretty well chain-smoked.’
‘Not a sausage, and the ticket’s a plant, like as not. That sort don’t buy returns.’
‘He’d been castrated.’
Jim looked at her.
‘Who told you that?’ he said.
‘Things the Inspector said. They’d lured him along to the play centre by saying there was a child he could have, and then they’d tied him up and done that to him—and other things. I don’t know if they meant to kill him.’
‘Ali, now, you mustn’t give yourself nightmares. Wasn’t that way, hardly at all. First, he’d been gassed—gassed himself most like—in a garage or shed somewhere big enough to hold a car, and then …’
‘Not in the play centre? How do they know it wasn’t in the play centre? What do you mean, gassed?’
‘Notice his cheeks at all?’
‘Yes, of course. That awful colour. As if he’d been painted.’
‘Carbon monoxide, that is. You get it in car exhaust. Does something to your blood, turns it that colour. And about him being moved, you can tell that straight off if he’s laid any length of time dead, before they come to move him. Soon as your heart stops pumping the blood around it sinks down in your body and gathers in whichever bit of you’s downest, and then after a bit it sticks there, so it looks like a ruddy great bruise all over that part. This fellow it’s not blue, like a bruise—it’s that red. Down in his feet and legs, and the hams and the bottom of his back. Notice his hand? White, so it must’ve been up. He couldn’t’ve died where you saw him, with his hand tied down like that. No, he was sitting somehow, with his head hanging forward on to his arm, as it might be on the dashboard of a car. Lot of people do themselves in like that, with car exhaust. There was that MP, only the other day.’
‘You keep saying he did it himself.’
‘Stands to reason. I don’t see him sitting still having that done to him. I wouldn’t.’
‘But something had been done to him, hadn’t it? I mean more than just moving him?’
‘I was coming to that. Let’s take it he did himself in in a car somewhere, and then somebody found him, and—don’t ask me why—they moved him out and brought him along to the play centre—hey had to break in—and they stripped him off—his clothes were all folded neat under the table, I forgot to tell you—and they laid him out and tied him down and then—Poppy, you got to believe this—they fastened a bouquet of flowers round his cock. That’s how they left him.’
‘Flowers?’
‘Smelly little ones you get from florists.’
‘Freesias?’
‘That’s them. Used a couple of elastic bands.’
Poppy stared at him. Relief streamed through her like an injected drug.
‘The feminine touch,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t take it serious. Just something one of my mates at the station came up with.’
‘But it isn’t a joke, Jim. They think it’s something to do with the girls at the play centre, don’t they? I don’t believe they really think it was suicide. They’re saying we somehow lured him into a car and gassed him and then we took him along to the play centre and decorated his penis with flowers and left him on the Lego table?’
‘No one’s saying it was you, Poppy.’
‘I tell you, it can’t have been any of us! You simply don’t understand what the play centre means to us, what a help it is, what a community! I tell you it’s absolutely inconceivable that any of us would choose to desecrate it by doing something like this. Can’t they see? I mean even supposing we’d caught him and killed him we simply wouldn’t have dreamed of then taking the body along there. None of us. It’s quite impossible. I can’t prove it, but I absolutely know. You’ll just have to take it from me.’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Poppy love. Police work’s not like that. You don’t start off saying “This is what must’ve happened” and then trying to prove it. You look into all the possibilities, such as the girls being involved, some of them, for instance.’
‘Well, I’m not going to help them, or you, or anyone else, look into this one. You haven’t told me what you thought about the music.’
He studied her in silence. She could feel his disappointment. How he must long to show the youngsters at the police station that he could still be some use to them. Perhaps he’d even persuaded the Inspector to let him try his luck with Poppy.
‘I’m sorry, Jim,’ she said.
‘If that’s how you see it. I respect that. All right, let’s give the lady another listen. Some of this modern stuff they set for comps, you’ve got to play it and play it before you even begin to see what the bloke might be at. Got any gin?’
‘Good idea.’
She couldn’t have kept the eagerness out of her voice. ‘Like that is it sometimes?’ he asked.
‘I had one when the police car brought me back. That was against the rules, because it was the middle of the afternoon and I had Toby with me. Anyway, there was just enough for another good slug as soon as the clock struck six. I’ve got a fresh bottle but another rule is I don’t start one on the same day I finish an old one, but since you’re here …’
‘You need that many rules?’
‘Only on bad days. I know they’re stupid, but they do help.’
She fixed the drinks and started to run the tape back. ‘That class of singers,’ he said. ‘Trouble is you can never hear what they’re saying.’
‘It’s all in German anyway, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’ve got the text. I could translate for you as we go along if that would help.’
‘You do that.’
So that she didn’t need to shout across the room they sat side by side on the sofa with Poppy murmuring the lines. The gin and the music, relief at what Jim had told her about the man’s death, Jim’s closeness, Hofmannsthal’s words, the whole complex of sensuality and of time rushing away from the day when the body first wakens to its possibilities until the day when flesh goes cold, made her skin crawl. Her tongue chose the English it needed. She was electrically aware of the solidity of walls and furniture. When the aria ended she rose and switched the tape off and stood by the mantelpiece again.
‘I sort of get what you’re on about,’ said Jim. ‘Like the Last Post, Armistice Day. Know what that can do to you?’
‘Do I not.’
‘Way I see it, you can have too much of that type of thing. In its right place, like I say Armistice Day, it says stuff you can’t say any other how, not with words, know what I mean? But mostly what you want music for is make you feel good.’
‘Hallelujah Chorus all day long?’
‘Didn’t say that. You got to have a bit of variety for a start. More the better, my case.�
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‘That’s not what I meant—I wasn’t fair, putting it like that. I suppose it depends on what you mean by feeling good. When I was about, oh, fifteen I suppose, I spent most of my time mooning around imagining romantic ways of dying for the man I loved—you know, he’d marry this other girl and be happy with her and have everything he wanted and never know it was my sacrifice had made it all possible.’
‘Morbid.’
‘Lovely, for me, then. It really made me feel good. I can laugh at myself now, but I’m still glad it happened. What we’ve just been listening to makes me feel good too, a little bit in the same way, I suppose, but it’s infinitely richer and deeper and stronger because it’s about real life, not childish moonings. She’s younger than I am, but she knows what it’s like.’
‘You’ve got a bit of time yet, Poppy.’
‘I hope so.’
She looked down at him. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, cradling his glass, beaming up at her, bright-eyed, so doggy that she only just stopped herself from saying ‘Rats!’ to him. Or was she reading into his normal look of interest what Mrs Jinja had told her about his dealings with the young mothers who came to the school? He didn’t seem to sense the sudden discomfort she was aware of, but she felt a need to change the subject and did so, awkwardly.
‘You help a lot of people, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Do my best.’
‘Mrs Jinja said you were wonderful about her daughter.’
‘Mind like a sewer, that woman. Fuss she made coming to see me that time. Brought her auntie along, little old lady like a dried mushroom, couldn’t speak a word of English. Suppose she thought I might have a go at her out there in the street. Gah, it would’ve been like climbing Mount Everest!’
He was clowning it, deliberately. Had he read her thought? Was she as transparent as she thought him? And he, perhaps, not? She laughed, and he laughed with her.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said. ‘That mood, I could really go for you, Poppy.’
Play Dead Page 8
