‘I don’t know.’ Jessica Plymmet dipped her eyes to the table. She’d been wondering that herself, for some time now. ‘She went abroad, I think.’
‘Abroad?’ But it wasn’t really a question. Barbara knew what it meant. Lost to the sea, to the winds, to the earth. Lost to the north and the south and the east. But not the west, perhaps. A country with a billion souls (or thereabouts), the perfect place in which to follow a trail. Or to start as one person and end up as somebody else. Ruby had gone to the promised land, just as she had always said.
‘Have you heard from her recently?’ Barbara asked, not certain which answer she wanted the most.
For a moment Jessica Plymmet seemed lost, bereaved almost, as though something important had been excised from her life. ‘No,’ she said, picking up her teacup to cover her confusion. ‘Not for a long time. Ten years.’
‘But you do know where she is now?’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid.’ Mrs Plymmet put her cup down. ‘I’ve tried to find out, but your sister is as difficult to track down as you are.’
Barbara shifted in her seat. At least one part of her plan had worked. ‘Is Mr Nye involved?’ she asked.
‘Younger or older?’
‘Older.’ Though even after all these years Barbara’s heart went all pitter-patter at the thought that the younger Mr Nye might be revealed again too.
‘No.’ Jessica Plymmet was particularly firm on that. ‘Mr Nye Senior’s gone to a funeral,’ she added.
‘A funeral?’ Barbara was surprised. Two in as many days.
‘Yes,’ said Jessica Plymmet, touching with a napkin at a crumb of icing sugar caught on her lip. ‘For a client. At a nursing home, on the outskirts.’
‘And the younger?’ Barbara wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but it was probably best to find out.
‘The younger went abroad too. He . . .’ Jessica Plymmet cleared her throat for a second, as though she had something difficult to impart (which she did). ‘He died. In a car crash. Some time since.’
A man all skinny and flat, bucking in a damp seaside bed. Barbara sighed and lifted her own teacup to cover the small flash of disappointment that even after all these years still rushed across her face. What was it about all her chances that they only ever led to nought?
Across the table Jessica Plymmet straightened her fork on her plate. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Barbara put down her cup. ‘I’m sorry too.’
Both of them knew what the other woman meant.
Barbara touched the corner of the magazine cutting. ‘And this,’ she said, pointing to the tuft of hair that lay within its folds. Silver, as though cut from the tresses of an angel. ‘Who does it belong to?’
‘It’s your mother’s,’ Jessica Plymmet replied.
‘Mrs Penny’s?’
‘No. Your real mother’s,’ she said.
At number 14 Elm Row, just returned from scattering Dorothea Walker to the winds at last, Mr Nye Senior laid a fire in the front-room grate. Once a parlour with curtains thick and green, the room was empty now, all dirty walls and floor stripped bare. But Nye Senior knew already that it would be perfect for his study. A place where secrets could be made and kept.
Despite years of skimping and neglect, 14 Elm Row still stood, in amongst the general decrepitude all around. Miners’ strikes. Bin strikes. The three-day week. Postal workers and gravediggers refusing to deliver and dig. The house had seen it all and survived. Gutters choked with lilac. Lintels leaking into brick. A money pit, some people called it. An opportunity, was what Mr Nye Senior saw. And Mr Nye Senior always had known how to secure things that were not really his to keep.
In the cold glory of the Walkers’ former parlour, he crouched now at the grate with an anonymous file of paperwork in one hand and a battered old tea caddy in the other. Inside were the leftovers from another era – a record of everything he had ever done wrong. And everything he had ever done right. Birth certificates for two children christened in linen and lace. Death certificates for the same. Official adoption certificates stamped by an accommodating judge, transforming two little girls from Walker to Penny overnight. An admissions form with his father’s signature on it, securing medical detention for as long as might be required. An ID card stamped DECEASED. And the sale deeds for a house. Also a last will and testament naming the remaining daughter, read out only that morning, in part at least.
Mr Nye Senior crumpled Mrs Penny’s will and placed it in the grate along with all the other Walker paperwork. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Wasn’t that what she always used to say? He tipped the contents of the battered old tea caddy on top. Some stiff little photographs showing a woman sitting on a chaise longue with a lumpen baby in her lap. And a whole series of letters from America asking for someone to please write back. It only took a moment for everything to go up.
The flames rushed through Mr Nye’s secrets as though through fresh air, burning and sparking with a blue-and-orange light. As the fire spread, he threw on the final contents from the very bottom of the tea caddy – two tiny snippets of hair, as golden in their first moments as they were now in their last. All that remained of a pair of twins, long shrivelled in their graves. The hair shrivelled too as Mr Nye Senior watched it disappear to nothing. Then he levered himself up and went to the sideboard to fetch himself a drink.
There was only one thing Mr Nye Senior did not submit to the flames. An admissions form for a Dorothea Walker, a memento of sorts for a woman whose feet had lain limp in his lap. Mr Nye’s fingers trembled for a moment on his glass as he remembered the slice of flesh between the crevice of her legs. Despite all the women in his life he wondered now if it had ever got better than that. If his son had survived, perhaps? Delivered him grandchildren who would laugh as they ran from the front door to the back? Mr Nye brushed at the shoulders of his suit where ash from the paperwork of all Dorothea Walker’s descendants had floated up.
Still, life was what you made of it. And hadn’t he made this? Three storeys and a coal cellar, all intact. In a part of town that would only ever go up. Also a new maid who would clean any mess tomorrow, down on her knees like the good girl that she was – just arrived from the Philippines in search of a new life. The maid knew an opportunity when she saw one. And Mr Nye would reward her, just as he had rewarded all his young women in the past.
But before that, there was one final reward Mr Nye Senior wished to acquire for himself, just because he could. A painting, small and brown, the perfect size to fill a gap on his office wall. Barbara Penny’s visit might have been unexpected; trouble, perhaps, had he not taken care to destroy everything that was left. But it also meant opportunity – the chance to get back what was rightly his. And opportunity was what kept a man such as Mr Nye Senior standing, despite all the years that might pass.
Leaving his fire still burning, Mr Nye went out into the hallway to the large, old-fashioned phone. Mrs Plymmet was not what she had once been, but she was still reliable, at least. Able to track down any address he might ask for, however obscured by all the time that had passed. The receiver hung heavy in Nye Senior’s hand as he waited for those liquid vowels to speak.
‘William Nye & Sons solicitors.’
‘Mrs Plymmet. I need you to find an address for me. And take some dictation. A letter.’
‘Of course, Mr Nye. Proceed.’
‘Dear Miss Penny . . .’
There was a pause at the other end of the line, as though Jessica Plymmet was deciding (which, of course, she was). Then William Nye Senior heard a sound he was not used to. A click as the receiver was replaced.
Barbara Penny rode home to the north with nothing but a case of silver apostle spoons tucked into her bag and a small tuft of Dorothea’s hair tucked into her purse. The last relics of the Walker Penny family, not including herself, of course, or the sister she had lost to the west.
But Barbara wasn’t expecting to hear from Ruby any time soon. After all, she had vanished into a country of a billion
souls, if what Jessica Plymmet had said was correct. Chasing after the ghost of a person Barbara knew for certain had been dead for almost forty years. Still, as they passed the bridges of Berwick, crossing the border from the south, Barbara felt again the echo of that emptiness she’d carried inside her whole life. Trust Ruby to have been right about one thing. Their mother had been alive, until last week, at least.
She arrived in Edinburgh as dark crept down from the sky, stepping from the train into the sedate bustle of Waverley ready to tell her tale at last. Of children born and died. Of madwomen dragged out into the street. Of sisters lost and abandoned. Of a mother who had tried in her own way to keep her daughter safe.
On her way back to the flat she bought chips, a treat for her and Margaret to eat together before they settled to everything else. Warm and damp in their paper, smelling of salt and hot vinegary sauce. She arrived at their door with her coat unbuttoned and her patterned scarf all loose. For what was there to do now that both her mothers were dead? Set up a wail about how everyone had always left her? Or go home to do what any real mother did best. Cleave to her child, however inadequate the attempt.
‘Margaret!’
Barbara’s voice had an urgency to it as she came up the stairs of the close, calling out as she opened up the door to the flat they shared together, a mother and a daughter with nothing between them but people who Barbara was certain now would never be coming back. She called again as she pulled off her coat to hang on the rack, hurried with their chips into the kitchen.
‘Margaret!’
But there was only silence in reply.
For there it was again, that hole in the air that Barbara had experienced once before. Nothing in the kitchen but a note on the table held down by a single tin of peas:
Eggs
Bread
Milk, 2 pints
Jam
Barbara Penny’s own list of instructions, left behind the day before for a daughter who had left her behind too.
Margaret Penny crossed with her mother at the border. One to the north. The other to the south. Ne’er the twain shall meet. One clutching a box of silver spoons. The other a coronation penny pressed up against her hip.
When the moment for a quick exit came Margaret had taken it, as she’d always known she would. Climbed on the first bus south that she could find and settled in at the back. Down, down long motorways, past service stations and cafes where the windows shone long into the night. On, on into the early hours of the morning, orange velour seats scratching at the underside of her knees. Men drinking one can of Special after another until they fell comatose onto the back of the seat in front. Down, down to the dirty, bustling streets of London where nobody knew her name or where she had come from. Nor where she might go next.
She took the coronation penny with her, just in case. Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. Because luck was what Margaret knew she needed now, more than anything else. She hadn’t bothered to leave behind a note. For Margaret Penny had learned at least one thing from her mother.
Leave no trace.
2011
A lilac hat. A turquoise suit. A coat the colour of wet sand. And a Rainmate, just in case. The scene of the second crime was not as cold as the first, but it had the disadvantage of containing so many belongings it was hard for Margaret to know where to start.
Back at The Court, taxi waiting outside to take her to Mrs Walker’s flat so that she could complete her task, Margaret rummaged through her mother’s personal belongings in a manner that she knew would never have been allowed if Barbara had been there to watch.
Capacious underwear. A whole drawerful of thermal vests. Bedsocks and reading glasses. A tumbler with something sticky around the rim. Some things had changed over the last thirty years, but less than Margaret might have imagined. Still, however hard she searched there was no sign of what she had come looking for. A Brazil nut with the Ten Commandments etched into its shell. Nor of the woman who must have stolen it, vanished all of a sudden just like Mrs Walker’s corpse.
For the first time since Margaret had returned from a lifetime in London, Barbara was nowhere to be seen, disappeared like the final piece of Janie’s jigsaw. Hadn’t even bothered to leave a note. When Margaret first stepped into the empty flat, she’d not been certain whether to be pleased or worried at this new development. Then, when she called out and got no reply, she decided to be neither. After all, Barbara’s business was her own and nobody else’s – she had always made that quite clear. And Margaret knew an opportunity when it presented itself.
She went through each room in a systematic manner, digging up all sorts. Greasy brown lipstick in the bathroom. A half-bottle of rum hidden behind the empties under the kitchen sink. That plastic tree her mother had always insisted on putting up every Christmas when Margaret was young, rolled beneath the cabinet in the living room as though its silver limbs had not been folded out this year. There were even the contents of an ancient suitcase, falling around Margaret to pepper the bedroom carpet like shrapnel as she pulled the case from the top of her mother’s wardrobe, lid yawning wide. A jewellery box of nappy velveteen. An apron unfolding as gracefully as a bird. A bottle with a glass stopper that bounced off the bed. Margaret knew that somewhere in amongst all this stuff there was a story. But it wasn’t the story she needed the answer to now.
Even so, it was strange going through her mother’s belongings in the absence of their owner, as though the worst had happened while Margaret had been occupied elsewhere. Perhaps Barbara had gone out to pray at one of her many churches and ended up under a number 24 bus instead. Nothing left for Margaret to do but sort out what should be kept and what should be donated. The stuff of Barbara’s life ladled into bin bags for distribution across the charity shops of Edinburgh. Recycling, it was the new religion. Just as Mrs Walker had recycled a sheet of newspaper into a makeshift layer of clothes.
After all, it was only that morning Margaret had found Barbara praying for salvation. Seven a.m. and just off the sleeper, blown in on the cusp of a snowstorm ready to close her case for good. Only to find her mother down on her knees in front of the television, forehead pressed to the carpet, quilted dressing gown stretched tight across the great expanse of her rump. Help me, Jesus. Help me, Allah. Help me, God. Though Margaret never had been certain what exactly Barbara needed to be saved from.
‘What are you doing?’ Margaret had gazed at the strange apparition of her mother seeking some sort of benediction.
Barbara jerked at the sudden interruption, twitching and banging her head on the television set as she tried to get up. ‘Christ!’ As though she’d been caught in the middle of a particularly excoriating confession (which, perhaps, she had). ‘I dropped the remote,’ she mumbled, rolling back onto her haunches, followed by a long and painful wheeze of her chest.
But the remote was where it always lay, on the arm of Barbara’s chair, hidden beneath the TV guide.
Margaret moved forwards then. ‘Here, let me help you.’ For there was something odd about seeing her mother prostrated – as though she was making some kind of cry for help.
But Barbara just flinched, lumbering into a kneeling position, her face a startling puce. ‘Don’t fuss.’ Breath whistling and wailing as though she was an express train running towards a station with no plans to stop.
‘Have you lost something?’ Margaret prepared to prostrate herself in her mother’s place. ‘I’ll find it if you like.’
‘No,’ Barbara insisted, clutching the pockets of her dressing gown as though to hold everything in place. ‘I can do it myself. Not useless yet.’ Then she reached for her grey NHS stick and began to lever herself up.
Margaret had seen the sticky liquid shining on her mother’s lips. Communion already over for the day, not even eight o’clock.
Once Barbara got back in the armchair, thighs spreading to fill the whole space, the two women stared at each other over the great expanse of beige.
‘Bac
k so soon,’ Barbara said. It didn’t appear to be a question.
‘I was going to ring you.’
But both mother and daughter knew this was not the truth. Still, Margaret ploughed on. Who Dares Wins (and all that). ‘I’ve come to close the case,’ she said. ‘Get out from under your feet.’
‘Well, that’s that then.’
And there it was again. That look. Fear. Or something like it. Scuttling across her mother’s face.
Margaret had stared at Barbara then, her hair all scrawn and scruff, white tufts sticking out in odd directions. It had grown so sparse Margaret realized all of a sudden she could see right through it to her mother’s scalp. ‘You helped me solve it, actually,’ she said, a child again just wanting her mother to be pleased. ‘Matthew 19, verses 14 to 16.’ And she took the Brazil nut from her coat pocket so that Barbara could see.
‘What?’ Barbara’s whole body twitched, hands aflutter, as though she’d been given some sort of electrical shock.
‘The Ten Commandments. Can you believe it?’
Though by the look on Barbara’s face, it had seemed that she could. Just for a moment she flashed all puce once more, from beneath the collar of her dressing gown right up to the crown of her head. A distress flare lighting up a dull morning, before the colour dropped away again to nought. Then Barbara’s chest set up a great heaving and a moaning, as though she might be about to expire in her armchair, right there, right then. Nothing between her and Mrs Walker but a roller blind and a kitchen that smelt of bleach rather than ash.
‘Mum!’ Margaret rushed to her mother’s side, dropping the Brazil nut in her fright. It bounced once on the carpet before rolling away.
Barbara gasped and wheezed, struggling for breath, waving Margaret off with a sweep of her arm like the last desperate gesture of a drowning woman, catching her daughter on the cheekbone, thwack, with the remote control gripped like a weapon in her hand. ‘Nothing but tourist tat. One in a million.’ At least that was what Margaret thought her mother said, before she backed away.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 25
