by John Gardner
She propped herself on one arm and saw feet protruding from the bath, heard ghastly cries as though from a ruptured voice box and finally perceived that the cries came from herself.
The voice belonging to the legs and feet hanging over the side of her bath was a different voice, the sound of a husky, slow and deformed voice — ‘I dident mean — She told me to do it — She told me — Emily said I had to — I dident mean it —’ and she saw the face, tearful and terrible in one mixture. The face of Golly Goldfinch, as her lover heaved him out of the bath by his handcuffed wrists and half threw him at the two uniformed lads whom he had somehow summoned.
And in the doorway stood a third figure — Molly Abelard — an arm outstretched with a pistol in her hand aimed squarely at Golly.
‘I’ll talk to him later,’ Tommy snarled. ‘Don’t give the press a bloody thing. Just get him away from her. Don’t give him an inch, Molly, hear me?’
Funny, Suzie wondered, is Molly allowed to do that? Is she allowed to carry a gun?
She had thought of Golly Goldfinch as relentless, she recalled. He was more. He was tenacious, resolute, inexorable, unshakeable until he came up against Dandy Tom Livermore, who was at this moment kneeling beside her and enfolding her, whispering endearments and giving her courage.
An ambulance was on the way, and a police doctor. In a little while she would be safe.
She felt the ragged traces of terror in her veins and could not control her limbs, didn’t know if she’d ever use her voice again. Shivering there on the bathroom floor, wet and like a whipped puppy.
A pair of nurses and a doctor were suddenly there, as if Dandy Tom had waved a magic wand and brought them up out of a star trap. Was she in a pantomime? she wondered. Had Golly played the Demon King? Was Dandy Tom really Dandini?
As they carried her out, she croaked her thanks to Tommy, but she didn’t know if he heard, or even understood.
But she heard. She heard a choir singing one of her favourite hymns. One her dad had liked as well and she knew he had somehow been very close to her in the past half-hour —
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.
And she really didn’t know what that had to do with anything except, perhaps, that Golly was so warped and hazardous that he had been in danger of becoming the antithesis of all those sentiments.
In the ambulance the doctor gave her an injection and she slid quietly into sleep.
*
She woke a couple of times during what she thought was the night, to a feeling of great fear. On both occasions she was aware of someone, or something, sitting near her bed. On the third occasion she burst through her fear and saw that it was a policewoman in uniform, though at the time she didn’t believe it for a moment.
When she woke again it was Molly Abelard, in a twin-set and grey skirt. ‘Shush, Suzie,’ she soothed. So Suzie presumed that she had been talking in her sleep, or crying. She remembered the gun and how it seemed to have grown out of Molly’s hand, and that frightened her.
It must have been the next day that she wakened properly, or maybe it was the day after that. A pair of nurses propped her up. Talked to her and listened as she tried to croak back. Propped up she found that it was difficult to move her head and there was a moment when she actually thought that if she moved it any further it would fall off. They gave her a pad of paper, like the ones she’d had at school, and several pencils so that she could communicate by writing. She didn’t much feel like it though.
They fed her, painfully, with some kind of clear soup — a consommé with bits of spaghetti in it — and late at night Tommy Livermore visited her with the doctor.
The doctor asked a lot of questions. Could she feel this, or that, or the other thing? He looked down her throat with an unpleasant instrument, then got a nurse to take the bandages from her neck. His examination of the neck wasn’t the most longed-for experience of her life.
‘Want to have a look?’ the doctor asked. She nodded and her head nearly fell off again. ‘Shit!’ she said, but not out loud. They held up a mirror and she couldn’t bear to look for very long. Her neck was swollen and deformed, like a goitre, as if someone had forced a great raw misshapen red balloon under her skin, and through it there was a deep scarlet slice, a cavern disappearing into her flesh.
‘It’ll be back to normal in no time — well, a few weeks,’ the doctor said. He wore an expensive suit, she noticed. Dark with chalk stripes, and he was very smoothly shaved. His skin glinted and he had presence. ‘Everything will take time. You’ll probably feel a bit strung out and generally dicey for a while, but you’ll be fine when we’ve got you up and walking around.’
Oh certainly, she thought, if my head stays on and if I ever get my voice back, I’ll feel over the moon. And if I manage to stop jumping at my reflection; or worrying in case that’s Golly’s soft footstep on the stair, coming closer to the door, on the landing.
Then Tommy stayed with her. He had brought flowers, a bottle of Lucozade and several cards — one each from Molly Abelard, Shirley Cox and Billy Mulligan, and a big one signed ‘From the Lads and the Spear Carriers’, with a row of Xs for kisses and Os for hugs. How did he know she liked Lucozade? When she had her tonsils out they gave her glasses of Lucozade with vanilla ice cream floating like icebergs in the fizzy liquid. That was when she was four years old.
Then there was the upsetting business of Ned Griffith. First, a long letter from him, full of sadness and what-ifs and buts and how he was sorry: a dull letter really except for his apology for his folly in Cambridge and for leaving Overchurch on Christmas afternoon.
‘I did not see how I could help any more,’ he wrote lamely about the latter event. The next week there was bad news. Ned Griffith was dead, bounced by Me109s over the Pas de Calais with another young pilot, Jamie Simnel; both wiped from the sky. Ned aged twenty-four; Simnel barely twenty. It was happening to all the best people in this washed-out, grey, tired and battered country where everything seemed to have been painted in insipid watercolours.
But, after the doctor left, on the night that Tommy brought her the cards and flowers she had a little cry and then asked — as best she could — if Golly was under lock and key. She was still terrified of him and would be for a long time to come. She reckoned Tommy was as well.
‘Don’t worry, heart, they’re going to keep him locked up tight for the rest of his natural.’ Golly was spending time with the trick cyclists, as Tommy called them. ‘There’s nothing remotely sophisticated about Golly. Just an efficient killing machine.’ As for the trick cyclists, ‘Funny people,’ Dandy Tom said. ‘Still, they did a lot for a pair of my uncles, and one almost cured my Aunt Annie.’
About Golly he said, ‘Takes orders, then goes and does it. Totally cold-blooded. They say — the trick cyclists say — that he probably invented a voice in his head in the early stages. It’s not uncommon, he’d believe it completely of course.’ He reckoned that they could still uncover a lot of Golly’s victims. ‘Been at it since he was quite young. Then someone hit on a way of trying to use him. Quite clever. Sussed him out, crept up to him in the dark and whispered orders into his ear.’
‘Other news?’ Suzie wrote, wanting to get off the subject of Golly. But that was impossible.
They had arrested Barry Forbes. ‘Good case against him: aiding and abetting Goldfinch; possibly two murder charges — we’re almost certain he killed Emily Baccus and Golly’s mother, Ailsa. He certainly had a solid personal motive to keep Golly a few steps ahead of the law.’ Tommy told her they were piecing together the story of Manny Spellthorne’s disappearance. ‘Now Golly’s starting to talk he’s telling us all kinds of things.’
It looked as though Forbes had dogged Golly to Overchurch, then followed him afterwards. ‘Haven’t a clue about his motives, except that there was money in
it somewhere along the way, and Lavender had him on a short leash as well. We’re investigating the Benton/Baccus business, and that generated a lot of loot.’ They were keeping that side of things a bit quiet though. ‘The PM doesn’t need that kind of scandal at the moment.’ Forbes, he said, was ideally placed to provide certain introductions.
It was rather shocking really, Suzie thought, that there might be rotten apples in the government itself, particularly at this terrible time when the country seemed to be teetering on the brink of disaster. Unheard of, she imagined in her naivety.
After a while, Tommy told her he loved her, and that made her heart perform a few arias and took her mind off the worst excesses of this unpleasant business.
‘Of course the other Baccus — Lavender — is heavily involved,’ he said. ‘It’s really obvious now, couldn’t have been anyone else — close to Golly for all that time. From what’s been said, it was Lavender who involved Forbes, got him to dispose of Manny Spellthorne’s body — so Golly says. If you can believe him.’ A long pause and some tapping of the teeth with the gold pen. ‘Incredibly odd relationship that — Lavender and Barry. Incestuous, I suppose.’
Certainly it was Lavender who had been the voice in the night, coming out of the dark to give Golly his instructions.
Kill with the wire.
They’d found two wigs in the Dyers Road house, and some photographs. Shirley Cox had been sent down to Middle Wallop to show a photograph to Fordham O’Dell. He had identified her, with her own hair, as the Emily Baccus he knew. Yet a photo of her in the dark wig made her almost a dead ringer for the real Emily. Shirley had come back thrilled to bits, having been dined in the officers’ mess. ‘Met some wizard chaps,’ she had said. ‘Got some pukkah gen. Piece of cake.’
‘She’s been going around using Raff slang ever since,’ Tommy said, and they had a laugh about it, though Suzie couldn’t laugh because it hurt and she found her face muscles impossible to move. She thought of the old joke about the soldier fighting the Zulus. Got a spear through his shoulder and dragged himself into the CO’s office. ‘Doesn’t it hurt, Cogger?’ asked the CO, to which Cogger replied, ‘Only when I laugh, sir.’ And that only made matters worse.
Eventually, Tommy turned back to the case. The one certain target, he reckoned, was Jo Benton. ‘Worked together, played together, whored together and, I suspect, conned together and maybe blackmailed together as well. No doubt she enjoyed the games, but there was an even darker side. They were making a fortune one way or another — mainly the other.’
Benton’s murder, he said, was hiding a tree in a forest: something they had discussed before. ‘It was an idea I had. With murders that don’t have an obvious suspect — particularly with repeats — you go through the whole spectrum. It was one possible, I thought; pretty far down the list, but there nevertheless.’
‘Like the film you saw at Saturday pictures?’ she wrote.
He laughed. ‘The Clutching Hand? Yes. Sure, heart.’
It was at this point that she mentioned Molly Abelard to him: Molly Abelard and the pistol. Had she actually seen that, or was it an hallucination?’
‘Depends, heart, doesn’t it?’ With the cute smile and one eyebrow cocked upwards.
‘Tommy don’t be silly.’ She was weary and almost ready to doze off again.
‘With Molly, heart, you never know. She’s given a lot of licence. People turn a blind eye.’ Leaving her really none the wiser.
When Tommy came in on the following afternoon the news was not good. They had yet to trace Lavender. ‘Didn’t say anything last night. You were pretty harry flakers. Well, we toddled along, mob-handed, as they say, ready to batter her door down. Ended up looking like a posse of prats.’
‘What’s happened to her?’
He gave an immense Gallic shrug. ‘Gone missing, heart.’ Now he pulled a rueful face. ‘Vamoosed, disappeared, evaporated. We’re searching of course, and we’ll eventually find her.’ He tapped his teeth with the end of his gold fountain pen. ‘Eventually.’
Between them, he told her, they’d run quite a service for our brave fighting men. Jo Benton, Emily Baccus, Lavender and probably the Wren, Monica Parker from HMS Daedalus, ‘And who knows, what other girls. You saw the address books and diaries. Could’ve had another stable with a hundred beds. There was a great deal of money in it. We’ve found one set of books, and it’s true what they say: where there’s muck there’s money.’
Everything pointed to an inevitable falling out between the various participants. Lavender, he claimed, turned out to be the most ruthless charmer of the lot. ‘It was a bomb waiting to explode,’ he said. Lavender also had a wonderful weapon in her bottled spider, Golly Goldfinch. ‘Just pray she doesn’t find another before we feel her collar.’ A flicker of concern crossed his face before he quickly changed the subject, and Suzie knew he was somehow blaming himself for letting Lavender slip through his fingers; and he just couldn’t leave it alone. ‘I’ve no doubt that Lavender started the rot: that she’s the prime cause for the killings. She manipulated Forbes and Golly — in different ways, but she was the one moving the pieces around.’
Then, of course, she’d had the cool nerve to order her own death. ‘Cold calculating bitch that she is. Tells Goldfinch to kill her, cool as a corpse.’
‘To mislead us?’ She wrote the question on a blank page.
‘Well, a couple of reasons, I guess,’ he sighed. ‘But she certainly expected to lead us astray, yes. Also I suspect she was trying to do away with him once and for all.’
Golly had already repeated the words he said Emily Baccus had used — ‘It will be hard, Golly, but you must do it. Once you have done it you will be free of me for ever. Free to do whatever you desire. Kill Lavender.’
‘For my money, heart, she was trying to corner him. First she told him to kill you, then herself, so when he came for her she’d be ripe and ready, scream blue murder, kill him probably. Self-defence, and we’d all say, ‘Ahhhhhhh. Never mind.’ She’d see to it that in the end it would be her, Lavender, who’d be Miss Right. With Golly dead, she’d figure we couldn’t prove a damned thing.’
Finally he turned to her with one of his brilliant all-consuming smiles. ‘And how do you feel, heart?’ He leaned over her bed and kissed her forehead. She made a sign with her hands that was clearly a message of thanks. He had undoubtedly saved her life, crashing into the bathroom, breaking down the door and fiercely restraining Golly. She also touched her left breast, then pointed to him, telling him she loved him.
‘What of Josh Dance?’ she asked.
‘Ah, spent part of today with Mr Dance. Took him down the Tombs.’ He grinned at the joke. ‘Gave him the third degree, me and Molly. They let him out of the military not just because of his wound. He has other problems, our Mr Dance. The good side is that he’s aware of them. Too aware. A normal bloke would think twice about doing what he’s done. Had himself neutered by your local friendly vet in Overchurch. Got his balls lopped off. Afraid he’d end up killing someone. That’s not altogether a normal reaction. Charming fellow but something’s loose, heart. My view anyway.’
Suzie winced, cringed and again signified that she loved Tommy.
Tommy understood that all right. ‘Naturally.’ He beamed, and for a while she tried to work out exactly what that meant.
She also wanted to know if anything was happening about Big Toe Harvey and her suspicions concerning the corrupt ways of Camford CID. ‘Yes, well,’ he started, looking a mite sheepish. ‘All very strange. The twins were up before Camford magistrates. No case to answer, it appears. Maybe that was the object of the exercise. In the fullness of time we’ll know, I suppose. Harvey’s asked for a transfer up West, I gather.’
In the here and now, she thought about her short time working in Camford and wondered what it would have been like if Tommy Livermore hadn’t come along and saved her. Her knight in shining armour. Or maybe the Gibb’s Dentifrice White Knight up against Golly’s Demon Decay.
When she could finally talk, when her mother and the Galloping Major were on their way to see her, she asked Tommy Livermore what the next move would be — when she was up and about.
‘Oh, heart,’ he replied. ‘First we must deal with the important things.’
She was relieved at that.
‘Yes, heart,’ he said ambiguously. ‘The sooner we get you through the detective course and you’re able to sit the sergeant’s exam, the better it’ll be for all of us.’ He flashed his ravishing smile, the one that consumed her alive, and she realized it was going to be okay.
Probably.
DV.
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