*
What colour would describe these walls? the police officer wonders. Pea green would probably do it. She is aware of beads of sweat breaking on her back; a trickle running down her spine. They keep these places so warm, she thinks, no wonder the old folk sleep all the time. ‘Let’s open a window, shall we?’ she says to the man before her. ‘Let some air in.’ She moves past him to do it.
It’s a good move. The young man – youngish, he’s probably thirty – is visibly disconcerted by the sight of his sketchpad on the table she’s been using as a desk. Prominent silent display: her old boss Sean Dowd’s tip. Just let it sit there. Get on with other things. You’ll soon find out if it has any evidential value. Evidential value, that’s what it’s all about at this stage. Initial questioning. Almost informal. Just her with each staff member in turn; her colleague WPC Morris sitting quietly beside the door, almost invisible.
The police officer breathes in the cool air: ‘That’s better.’ She turns back to the room, leans against the sill. Another old Dowd technique: speak to the suspect’s back. ‘Tell me exactly what happened, Mr Hibbs. Stuart. Exactly as you remember it.’
The man’s head turns a little as he shuffles round in his chair.
‘Just stay where you are, Stuart,’ she says. After what the chef has told her she needs to go in fairly hard with this one.
‘I was in the lounge. On my own –’
‘On your own?’ Cooler now, she returns to her seat.
‘Sorry. I was the only member of staff in there. Just me and the residents. They were watching television. Well, it was on. Most of them were asleep. Not Cyril, though.’
‘This is Mr Turvey?’ She places a hand on the sketchbook. Mr Hibbs notices. Blinks. She thinks again of the chef’s peculiar smile as he handed her the book: In here, I think, you will find things you should see. His hand deliberately brushing hers. Unpleasant. You get some odd characters in places like this.
‘That’s right. We call them by their first names. To create a family atmosphere.’
‘Go on.’
‘He wasn’t asleep. Then Joan comes into the room –’
‘That’s – Miss Walters?’ She looks down to her notes. So many names . . .
‘That’s right. She’s a B resident, but she sometimes comes into the small lounge. She goes over to Cyril and looks at him, really hard, and she starts to laugh. “It’s you,” she says. “I knew it was. I’d know you anywhere.” Then she called him a bastard. She does swear sometimes, Joan. She said, “I knew you’d surface one day, come bobbing up – and I’d be ready for you.” Cyril was upset by this and he started to get up. I called to her to leave him alone. I went over, took his arm and was saying something like, “Come on, Cyril, let’s have a little walk,” when I saw her behind us. She’d got Brenda’s walking stick, the one with an ivory handle, up above her head, and before I can say or do anything she brought it down on Cyril’s head. He went straight down. Without a sound. Just crumpled. Joan tried to hit him again. “There, you bastard,” she was saying. “Down you go. I knew I’d get you one day.”’
The police officer waits. Lets her finger tap the sketchpad. ‘And that was it?’
‘Yes. Then I went for help.’
He is watching her finger on the sketchpad. Now still; now tapping. She tries to forget the chef’s smile, his sticky hand. ‘What was Mr Turvey like?’
Hibbs smiles. ‘Oh, Cyril was a lovely man. Gentle. Quiet. Easily scared of stuff. A bit troubled. He had beautiful blue eyes.’
There’s a pause. The police officer opens the sketchpad, turns two or three pages until she finds what she’s looking for. ‘Yes, you seem to have been quite taken by Mr Turvey’s eyes, Stuart. You have drawn them several times.’ She watches him swallow. ‘On this page, just the eyes, drawn twice. Labelled Cyril’s Eyes, and then –’ She flicks on through the sketchbook. ‘– here they are again, but this time with wings. And here, curiously, in what looks like a goldfish bowl.’
‘Surreal –’
‘They certainly are.’
She looks at him and he looks back. He’s sweating. Forehead. Nose. He swallows again. Indicators? Dowd would say so. Not evidence, but strong indicators. ‘These are very peculiar drawings if you don’t mind me saying, Stuart. Some people might use the word disturbing. This one that’s labelled Edna Asleep. Why have –’
‘That’s in the style of Modigliani. That’s why the neck is elongated.’
‘All her features seem distorted to me. And here we have another of Mr Turvey. At least that’s what the caption says – Cyril. But unrecognisable. Broken up, one might say. Mutilated.’
‘A sort of Picasso rip-off. Cubism. Breaking down an object into its visual components. I was thinking of his portrait by Juan Gris when I did it.’
‘I see.’
He swallows again. Hard. Like he’s got a fucking bird fluttering about in his throat. The police officer watches. There’s a slick of sweat like varnish across his face, despite the room being cooler now. She watches, and waits. Dowd would be proud of her. Then, ‘I have to say there is something very brutal about these sketches, Stuart, something that doesn’t seem to be entirely compatible with what one would expect from a paid carer of the elderly.’
‘Where did you get that?’ Hibbs nods to the sketchpad. ‘Did Vladimir give it to you?’
‘Mr Karpin, yes he did. He also told me something that is supported by some of your other colleagues, something quite repellent really.’ Her fingers dance across the Cubist portrait of Mr Turvey. ‘It seems that you spend a lot of time threatening to kill the residents.’
It’s a difficult investigation. All the residents who had been in the small lounge at the time of the attack are suffering from some form of dementia, and pretty advanced they are too. Both a doctor and the manager had been with her when she had painstakingly gone round to each, crouching beside their armchairs, trying to talk to them. Nothing. Gaga, all of them. Joan Walters, the woman Stuart Hibbs claimed hit Mr Turvey, had clapped her hands like a child, singing Who’s sorry now?’ and blowing kisses.
And now she has a man sitting in front of her who believes he is leading an investigation into the bombing of a pub in the city centre and wants to start making arrests. ‘Now. Now. Get the buggers in custody,’ he barks. ‘If they’re Irish, arrest the bastards. Get them down to Edward Road. We’ll sort them out there.’ Bernadette Ryan, one of the senior carers, sits beside him, stroking his hand, but he’s oblivious. He’s on the case.
The police officer moves away from him back to the window where she takes a breath of cool air, looks out at an empty garden. A fruit tree in blossom. A bench beneath it covered in the stuff. It’s ten years since she’s had a cigarette, but by God she could do with one now. A long smooth Dunhill and a glass of cold Chardonnay. She turns back to the pea-green room. The man’s ranting has ceased. He’s looking around. Trying to work out where she’s gone, probably. She hopes someone will put a bag over her head before she ever gets to that stage.
There is always a motive, she tells herself, if you know where to look. But that’s in the real world. Here it is different. She looks across to the medication trolley standing in the corner, thinks about people like Dr Shipman, people like Beverly Allitt, Vanessa George. Cruelty. Madness. Power. Easy to see it all here. Another world. Locked away.
The man at the table has moved on from the IRA and is talking about a cruise. The Ionian sea. The blue blue sea. She won’t get any sense out of him. Perhaps she should take Hibbs in for further questioning. Or maybe let things lie, go away for a day or so and think it through. Cyril Turvey has no family, so there’ll be no one banging the door down for action. Perhaps she’ll have a chat with Dowd, too.
She could probably pin it on Hibbs. Circumstantial, but even so. He’s obviously a weirdo, the sketchbook shows that. And he’s made threats. All the time, apparently. Fan
tasy? Possibly. But then she knows serial killers often fantasise about killing, long before their first murder. If he gets away with this one, who knows how many he might do in before they catch up with him again?
There was no wedding ring on Hibbs’s finger. She wonders if he has a partner. If not, if he’s a loner, that would strengthen the case. After all, why would an old lady, however dippy, suddenly attack Mr Turvey? It didn’t make any sense. The manager has assured her that Joan Walters has never displayed any violence or serious aggression, other than poking people with her knitting needles, and the doctor confirmed this. Sweet was a word the staff used. Funny. Why would a sweet old lady attack Mr Turvey? No motive, nothing a coroner would see in her background as an explanation. Whereas Hibbs. He was the only one there at the time of the killing. Or, at least, he was as good as the only one. And she sees the faces – Shipman, Allitt, George – like a hand of cards before her. Yes, she’ll take Hibbs in. See how he holds up to questioning at the station. Get everything on record.
The man at the table turns. ‘The sea in Birmingham,’ he says. ‘It’s much deeper than it looks. Not many people know that.’ He taps the side of his nose; he is telling her a secret.
Hope Fades For The Hostages
Ailsa Cox
Every night and every morning. Two red zeros staring straight back at you. Exactly three a.m. A surprise. Not a surprise. The scent of a sleeping body lying by your side in the darkness. The steady puff and blow of breathing. Gentle, slowly now, do not disturb. The dead grate in the living room. The carpet threaded by silver trails. The house feels abandoned and hollow, and you yourself are its wandering ghost, pouring a whiskey, reading last week’s papers while you’re waiting for tomorrow. Hope fades for the hostages. Won’t be up long. But this time it’s different. A noise. Not just the wind sawing the trees, or the hum of the fridge, or a car swishing by. Something else, a dripping sound. Something dripping. Hold your breath and listen. You almost think it’s stopped. But there it is again, a little louder, gentle, insistent. Upstairs the sleeper dreams on, unaware.
It’s three in the morning. I’m writing this letter thirty thousand feet above the surface of the planet, the cabin lights down and the passengers snoozing, their bodies strapped in, slumped under the blankets, their faces gone slack and their mouths hanging open. You know I can’t sleep with this weird congregation of strangers, hate making these trips to the ends of the earth. When it’s three in the morning, back home in England, it’ll be 3 p.m. in Eastern Siberia. Dream of me while I’m talking landfalls and terminals with Mr Kim in the Chukotka Suite at the Hotel Anadyr.
They pull in at the motorway services, a constellation of low roofs floating somewhere in the void between departure and arrival. Frank has stopped here before, or his shadow has lingered, waiting for change from the fat man at the till. ‘Can I interest you . . .?’ pointing at the giant Aeros, mint and orange flavour, hurrying back to the van, coffee spilling on his sleeve, the muddy verges sucking at his shoes. He didn’t want to stop, if it wasn’t for the rain he would have kept on driving, but he can’t see the road for the mist and the spray of the lorries. Beneath the duvet, Linda’s breathing seems to be slower and hoarser, but she’s okay, she’s just sleeping. ‘We’re fine,’ he says out loud, ‘we’ll make it.’ She knows that he would never let her down.
A tiny drop of water in the corner of the bay, how could you have not ever seen that before, and the cracks, new cracks everywhere, and the old ones spreading inexorably, and what have you done about it, nothing, not a thing, to stop that inevitable progress, until the whole place splits apart like the House of Usher. Bed down on the sofa. There will be no more sleeping. Your brain’s reeled in and yanked to the surface, and the small plangent sound of the drip punctuates the long hours like an irregular pulse, and it’s all the fault of the sleeper upstairs who said the house was solid, and he could do the work himself, and the only bucket you can find to catch the leak has got a hole in the bottom, why would you keep a bucket with a hole, and why are there so many chairs in this house . . .?
On the world map, England’s tiny, the British Isles just an outcrop, crumbled from the jagged edge of Europe. Flip the page round, and what do you get? On either side, the great mass of North America and Russia, and in between them a white patch, the Arctic, a white patch which is shrinking, and it is because the ice is melting that Mr Kim plans to send ships through to sink a cable which will cut the London-Tokyo latency by sixty milliseconds. Not much to you and me, but if you’re an algorithmic trader you get very excited by this kind of thing. Imagine a great snake nipping the toe of Cornwall, dipping down to the ocean floor, plunging across the Atlantic, hundreds of feet below the surface, amongst those deep sea creatures barely glimpsed by human eye, heading through the North West Passage and on to Murmansk, looping over the roof of Russia en route for Japan.
She’s so frail, there’s nothing to her, when he lifts her she might float away, but she begged him, begged him, to drive her to Truro. Another week or two, and they could have brought the baby to see her, but the worse she became the harder it was to say an outright no. So an if became a maybe and then a probability, and before he could stop himself he was bedding her down on a mattress in the back of the camper van, which was not something you really should be doing, but the van was running like clockwork, and there was no reason they should be pulled over, and she was no less comfortable there than she’d be anywhere else. More comfortable in some ways – it reminded her of when they used to go all over the place, parked up by rivers and roadsides. If they set off in the evening when the roads were so much quieter, they could be at their daughter’s in five or six hours. That was before the weather came down. But not to worry, they can still make it. He sends a quick text to his daughter, telling her not to wait up, and she sends something long and angry back to him within seconds. Can’t do right for doing wrong. Isn’t that always the case? When he starts the ignition, it makes a rasping sound, and they’ve hardly left the services behind before he’s on the hard shoulder, rain trickling down his neck, desperately trying to bring the engine back to life.
. . . and what does he do all day, what does he do, he goes round junk shops buying chairs that need fixing and comparing the prices they might fetch on eBay, and if you call someone in to give you an estimate for the plastering it’ll be a slur on his manhood, and besides those are cracks that can’t be skimmed over, fissures and canyons running deep inside the brickwork, and even as you lie there the drip is getting louder and he just won’t care, say it’s par for the course, an old house, decrepit, same as you and me, and he’ll make a show of senility, sounding a bass note on the solar plexus, and screwing his face into a caricature, winding you up, like when he talks about growing his hair and it looks awful. He spends money buying you beautiful things, an emerald necklace or an old lithograph, but you don’t want anything, you don’t want any things, and it comes to you that what you want for your birthday – what you’d really like – is for him to just get a hair cut.
Of course this is all on paper. It might not ever happen. If you check the Bude and Stratton Post, the news is still the falling quality of the local bathing water and the impact of bad weather on the tourist season – not a word about any trans-Arctic project starting on the beach. And yet somewhere on the globe they’re talking billions of dollars. Deals are being brokered, torn up and rewritten between cartels and oligarchs, speculators and major providers – every spin of the wheel setting smaller cogs in motion, sending PR men and security consultants and engineers like me, boarding planes in the hope of securing a contract, keeping an eye on those other passengers in blue shirts staring shifty-eyed at their smart phones shortly after the safety lights switch off. My job is simple. I do the drawings. Whether it happens or not, that doesn’t matter to me.
What a fucking moron. Putting petrol in the tank instead of diesel – he’s seen plenty of other fucking idiots do it – what else could it
be – and what in Christ’s name has he done, bringing her straight to the hour of her death? That’s what he keeps thinking, as he works in the driving rain by torchlight, keeps thinking and remembering something that’s stuck in his mind – three o’clock, they say that’s the turning point, if he doesn’t get her safe by three she won’t survive. There’s no help, never was, not the carrot juice or the vitamin pills or the positive thinking, just the hope of a miracle, the faint possibility that he’s wrong and it’s no more than a faulty connection. The phone buzzes in his pocket, but he can’t bear to answer because that’ll be Dawn again, and she won’t leave it to him, she’ll want to call an ambulance, and that’s something Frank can’t do. He cannot send Linda to hospital.
So now you’ve decided. Everything’s clear. Tomorrow you’ll have that conversation which will mark the first step towards a new beginning. Not even the drip seems so bad after all. Not even the cracks in the wall. You’re ready to creep back up to bed, and curl up beside the sleeper, rehearsing what you’re going to say when morning comes. Squeezing past a set of dining chairs stashed in the hallway, you set foot on the stairs, listening for the steady puff of his breathing, and suddenly it seems that you’re stepping on a gangplank and the house is swaying with the motion of the sea. He’s standing there waiting to help you aboard, but what kind of ship this is, and where you’re sailing, is something that is yet to be explained.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 14
