A man is venturing into Jean’s flat, watched by the crowd. He heroically shrugs, looking down every so often, afraid to touch her in case he gets whatever she’s got, then wanders out again. Women mumble. Men rub the back of their necks and scrunch their faces. There are boys in hooded tops here too. A bearded man in his pyjamas, with a French bulldog, who definitely lives on our side. Even the nervous woman is here, who I taught to count to fifteen. She sees me and reacts, eyeing me, excitedly. Instinctively, I turn to leave.
‘Doctor! Let this woman through. She’s a doctor!’ she bellows.
Oh, God. They perk up now. Their indecision has a leader. I turn, hold up a hand, as if to say, Yes, it is I, your saviour. Someone even starts to clap, but it doesn’t catch on. I am jostled up the concrete stairs and inside number forty-one. Despite ardent promises to myself that I would come clean, that I wouldn’t let this happen again, it’s happening again. I suppose this isn’t the ideal moment to mention to everyone that I’m not actually a doctor. That it all came from a misunderstanding with my phone and Internet cable. Public declarations are for Richard Curtis films. And I’m not good in front of crowds. I’m the kind of girl that would rather skulk around in the wings.
They all have their eyes trained on me. I want to get out of this as quickly as possible, but it’s difficult not to take a look around while I’m here. It’s very much as I left it. The cupboard, half open, shows her array of tin cans still tightly packed. I crouch down, sensing I’ve spent a moment too long surveying the place, rather than tending to the matter in hand. I must get back to playing Dr Gullick. Dr Gullick, who has certainly never been in this flat before and isn’t wondering what exactly happened here in between the time she left and now. Dr Gullick, who heals the sick. I crouch down to tend to her, without any idea what Dr Gullick will do next, but I have to do something, to please the assembled masses. After all, she may still be alive. But then, people who are alive aren’t usually blue.
I take her pulse with two fingers, pushing my hand between her chin and the floor to get to her throat. She’s cold. I’ve never felt anyone so cold. But then I’ve never felt a dead body before. I put the back of my hand in front of her nostrils, doing my best work from what I’ve gathered from old episodes of ER. No breath. I imagine her sitting up, gasping as the crowd reels, someone screaming at the back. She tells me to ‘get off, ya silly cow’, picks up a wooden spoon and throws some beans into a pan, muttering to herself all the while. But she doesn’t do that.
I take a leap of faith and open her eyelids. I don’t know why. Getting into it? Curiosity? It’s so intimate. My middle finger and thumb pulling apart the tissue paper eyelids of this formidable woman. I try desperately to hold back my gasp as I stare into her, the pupil dominating her eye. Doctors tend not to squeal. It doesn’t engender much trust.
Her eyes were so alive, so fidgety last time I saw them. I look into the pupil now and I’m struck by the emptiness of it all. How quickly we can all become ‘the body’. Where has the rest of Her gone? I’m struggling to come to terms with something. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Never been confronted so directly by what used to be an idea, death and nothing. No literature, television drama or gossip can prepare you for its glare. It’s so mundane. It’s a familiar tune. Hummed many times before, which will be hummed many more. And it chills me how quickly I can shrug it off, take the torch from my keys out of my pocket, shine a light in this whale’s eye and play out the final part of the artificial inspection. At the last, somewhere between the role and myself, I touch her hand and hold it for a second.
I turn to the crowd who proclaimed me their leader and shake my head. Some sympathetic groans. A couple shuffle away at the back shaking their heads. It’s as if they’ve just found out the bloke who comes to clean the windows isn’t coming this week. Even death itself seems an anticlimax I suppose, especially if it’s not happening to you. Or if you weren’t staring into the face of it.
‘Can someone call an ambulance, please?’ I shout to them all.
‘Isn’t she dead?’ a voice comes back.
‘Yes. I believe she is, but either way an ambulance will have to come and take her away.’
‘Why? If she’s dead, she’s dead,’ the voice comes back.
‘Because we can’t just throw her in a skip and be done with it.’
It comes out before I can stop it. I’m angrier than I thought I was.
‘She has to be pronounced officially dead. They’ll take away her body to be examined.’
‘Oh. You don’t think there’s… er… foul play, do you?’ replies another voice. With a tone that suggests the speaker thinks he’s in an episode of Diagnosis Murder. Rather than reality.
How detached we all are. Safe in our tiny dwellings. Hidden from the natural world, our windows and TV screens soft lenses that beautify. I feel like I’m the only one that really feels sometimes. If that’s not too narcissistic a sentiment.
‘No. I don’t think it’s… “foul play”. Personally. But that’s not up to me to decide.’ Just a dash sardonic. Classic Dr Gullick.
In reality, I can’t say whether there has been ‘foul play’ or not. It looks to me like a woman dropped stone dead and gave herself an almighty whack when she hit the ground. But maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to look. Because, maybe, someone gave her an almighty whack first, and then lay her on the ground to make it look like the injury was caused by the fall. She’s certainly gone down hard.
I could be more sure about my assumption. If I turned her over. But I don’t want to do that. I’d be scared to move her. I don’t want to ‘contaminate the scene’. Plus, I probably shouldn’t leave any more of my fingerprints in this place than there already are.
So I can’t be sure exactly what caused that blow. But then, you see, I’m not a doctor.
As someone volunteers to dial 999, I take one last look at her. A young woman dials as she holds her boyfriend’s hand. I think they live further down on the estate. I’m sure I’ve seen them before. I scan the other faces in the crowd too, just to check.
Before I go I have a last look around the place. I poke my head around the corner to see the living room more fully than I did the night before last. Then, coming back to the kitchen, I see a strange thing. The black metal poker she kept by the door. Is gone.
Her other weapons. The cricket bat and pipe sit by in their usual place for safe keeping. But not the poker.
Perhaps she needed it for something. I wonder where it is now. It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d ever be without. It was for her own protection. Jean was all too aware of the sorts of people that hang around here at night and what they’re capable of. I wonder if anything else is missing.
I play a quick game of spot the difference. The room the night before last. Versus the room today. I spy something else. With my little eye.
The porcelain figurine. The monkey. No longer smiles at me from the sideboard. She could’ve moved it, or broken it, after I left, I suppose. But by the look of the dust around it, I’d say it’d sat right there since about 1982. I don’t know why she’d choose last night to finally throw the thing away.
Someone’s been moving things around. And I’m the only one that would know it.
‘Well, there goes another one,’ a passer-by drops, a touch macabre. And anyway, who was ‘the one’ before this one? The student from the poster? I make a mental note to look into that. I wonder what her story is. I guess I’m developing a far keener sense of civic duty than I’ve ever had before. I’ve grown a conscience. I’ve grown curious.
There’s not so much care on display on the estate this morning. As if her death held a lower price for everyone else than it did for me. An old lady dies. So what? After the interest of it, everyone just goes home and sticks the TV on.
‘I’ve seen blood shed in front of me,’ she said the night before last.
‘But no one cares about the things I see,’ she said. And that’s how it feels this morning. Lik
e this is just going to be it. Her relatives in Portugal will be informed, appropriate tears will be shed for Grandma, as her bones hit the trough a thousand miles away, her insurance barely covering an empty ceremony, as in a distant room the relevant form is signed, and only I will care that someone may well have bumped her off. My only question is, why anyone would want to do that?
I walk away, slotting my black bag into my rucksack as I go. Relieved no one has got the chance to see inside it and catch me for the fraud I am. I’m going to have to stop doing that. Or invest in a stethoscope. I take out my phone to see if Aiden is worried about me. But there’s nothing from him. I see one missed call from a number I don’t recognise. I don’t usually answer calls from numbers I don’t recognise. But then I don’t usually call them back either. Which is what I’m doing now. I’m doing a lot of things that don’t make me feel myself lately. I turn as I call because it’s ringing. I don’t hear it through my phone, it seems to be coming from the direction of the crowd.
Christ. It’s coming from inside number forty-one and now the assembled mass hear it too. Late drama shoots through them and a man in shorts is heading back into her flat. He picks up the phone from her sideboard, shrugs and puts it back where he found it, as I make my way out of there. I put up my hood and head quickly back to my place, undetected.
I look at my missed calls and find she had tried to call me at five-thirty this morning. And, all of a sudden, I’m thinking a lot more seriously about that missing poker and figurine.
16 days till it comes. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Unknown – Unknown – The Neighbourhood – Unknown – Unknown – Killer – 15 degrees, clement – Unknown.
‘Caroo! Caroo!’ I call, as I stand on the balcony with my binoculars.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Aid shouts from the other room.
He’s perked up a bit recently. I had a good chat with him last night. Finally. But not about him. About me. And my things. My supposed issues. Don’t you find that sometimes happens? You mean to talk about the problem with them and it somehow ends up coming around to some problem with you. It was like that.
It was mainly about what happened the night I went to Jean’s flat. Yep. I came clean. About Jean, about the face that watched me, and everything after, including the phone call. He was pretty good about it really. Once I’d looked him in the eye, stroked his face and promised never to do anything that dangerous again. I told him of my best intentions and played the episode down.
I told him everything I saw over there. Then we discussed what we should do next – which, we concluded mutually, was pretty much nothing. Because behind his stories of adventure, which people seem to lap up, Aid is really a pretty straight guy. I cringed at his fears. His lack of adventure. He’s such a theorist. The most daring he got was to discuss calling the police, telling them all I know and leaving it at that.
I didn’t tell him I’ve already done that. I didn’t tell him I went to the police station straight away, to call it in, to tell them what I knew. I didn’t tell him they stared at me, like he does sometimes. I didn’t tell him they exchanged glances that clearly said, This one’s a bit odd.
I thought I heard a snigger after I mentioned the porcelain monkey. I had to repeat it. ‘Porcelain monkey,’ I said. And the main one in the brown suit smiled gently and asked how I knew all this. I said I’d been there and seen it. A while ago. And the poker.
I didn’t tell them it was the night before the night she died. I didn’t tell them about playing doctor. Of course I didn’t. But I said I’d been there. I put myself at risk by doing that. But I thought it should be said. I thought they’d want to know. But the one in the brown suit just stared at me and asked me about ‘when I was here before’. I said I’d never been here before. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a police station before. Never, in my life. I said he must be thinking of someone else.
I’m sure I saw one of them mouth, She’s fucking mental. Can you believe that? I’m sure I saw him do that. Hardly professional, is it? So I stared at him. I stared him down.
I know my porcelain monkey isn’t exactly a pile of bloody clothes or a smoking gun. But it is something, to me. They don’t know their arse from their elbow over there. It was a disgrace.
But I didn’t tell Aiden any of this. None of it. I didn’t tell him they virtually told me to sod off.
So having sat there, listening to Aid’s sensible words and telling him I’d put all this behind me and think nothing more of it, we hugged each other close and I felt properly loved for the first time in a long time. Then I got down to business and started planning what I was actually going to do.
‘I’m pishing!’ I shout back. Which you already know, of course.
‘You’re pishing off the neighbours, that’s for sure.’
‘Aiden, have you any idea how often that joke is made in birding circles?’ I don’t, we never moved in birding circles, but the answer’s ‘a lot’ I’d imagine.
‘It’s quite annoying,’ he said. Delicately so as not to crack the porcelain of our glued-together relationship.
‘I’m trying for something I haven’t seen before. Something rare.’
It’s true, that’s partly why I’m doing it. I’m still enjoying looking at those birds. They relax me. But it’s not the main reason.
‘What? A rare one, round here? Which one?’ he says.
You see, the main reason I’m pishing is so the neighbours see me, hear me. I’m looking to scale up my binocular use and I don’t want people to think I’m peculiar. Actually, I don’t mind them thinking that at all. I just don’t want them to think I’m looking at them. This way, if they see me with the binoculars, they’ll think:
Look there’s that nutty bird girl again.
Rather than:
Oh, shit, that bitch is trying to work out if one of us killed Jean.
Yes, Jean was killed. I know that now for certain.
‘I’m looking for an ivory-billed woodpecker,’ I say.
Now, you may now be at the stage where you’re reading this and you’re thinking: Come on, Lil, there is no way you’ll see an ivory-billed woodpecker in North London. I know. It sounds hilarious. But let me explain. It’s more of a metaphor. I’m looking for something that is hard to find. A person hiding in plain sight. In a crowd. That doesn’t want to be seen. So it’s really more of a metaphor. Aiden doesn’t know birds so I can tell him anything and he’d believe me.
Do you remember telling me about Phoebe Snetsinger, the woman with the malignant melanoma who spent her family inheritance travelling around the world? She was killed in a road accident in Madagascar, I think.
There was David Hunt, who was killed by a tiger in Corbett National Park, India, in 1985, while twitching. Very exotic.
Then there was the glorious Ted Parker, who travelled around North America and saw an incredible 626 species in one single year, from all over the continent. I think he survived.
Why I mention all this, is very simple. Birders are natural adventurers. This is the world you introduced me to. We’re risk takers. You. Me. And the others. Yes, some of them came to a sticky end. But there are many that extended their life lists way beyond what they thought was possible. Because they weren’t afraid. It’s time for me to take a few risks.
I’m sure you’ll understand. Someone murdered Jean and if I don’t do something they’ll get away with it. She’ll just disappear as if she was nothing. I’m not going to let that happen. There are still signs up for that missing girl too so I doubt anyone has come forward about her either. I can’t find anything about her being found, on the web anyway. I did find out that she was a lawyer in her final year of her pupillage, a bright future ahead of her. Then one day she was gone. This place is a black hole.
Yesterday, twenty-two hours ago to be exact, a sign went up outside Canada House, appealing for witnesses to a possible break-in at Jean’s place. A break-in! Meaning it’s highly probable they believe it was �
��foul play’ but no witnesses have come forward to support this theory. My sights were trained on that sign and its passers-by for almost the entire day yesterday. I got two hours’ broken sleep. But that’s about it. Not one person stopped and took the number. One thing I’ve picked up from every police-procedural drama to Crimewatch is that ‘the first twenty-four hours are crucial’. So we’re running out of time.
If we’re relying on the estate being filled with benevolent witnesses who love volunteering information to the police then we really are sunk. To some it’s a time drain, others just don’t want to keep that kind of company. Many might be scared of the repercussions, either from the killer or the police themselves. After all, half the people round here aren’t supposed to be here anyway. Either way, no one is offering the police anything by the looks of it.
‘There it is! I think I see one!’ I shout.
‘Really? Is that good? Is it rare?’ he says, getting up, but not quite brave enough to step onto the balcony. He’s a shut-in. I told you. He’s putting on weight. I worry about him.
‘I’d say so, come out here, come and have a look,’ I say, teasing him a bit, as I know he won’t. He hides away nowadays.
‘No, I don’t see anything from here. There doesn’t seem to be any birds out… that I can see anyway.’
‘Just because you dipped out doesn’t mean I didn’t see anything.’
‘What the bloody hell does that mean?’
‘Dipped out? Means you didn’t see anything. And now your gripped off. That’s when you’re annoyed that you dipped out.’
‘OK. Whatever,’ he says, heading back to the bedroom.
The Watcher Page 6
