by Joel Hames
After the trouble.
Lizzy couldn’t know about that. Not the truth of it.
There were three versions of the trouble. There was Sam Williams, thrown from grace, kicked out of Mauriers for unknown reasons and left to fend for himself.
That was the version the public knew, if they cared to find out.
There was Sam Williams, unscrupulous dealer in suspect fees and tainted police officers in disreputable pubs. The Sam Williams who got results, even if he never quite said how. The Sam Williams whose methods were exposed by David Brooks-Powell and condemned by Elizabeth Maurier. And thrown from grace, as above.
That was the version the insiders knew. Half the legal community, and, no doubt, Lizzy Maurier.
And then there was the deeper truth. Sam Williams, hotshot genius with a photographic memory and a nose for the right angle, who’d freed a man who’d served twenty years for a murder someone else had committed. The Sam Williams who’d turned, at the moment of his victory, and looked at Bill and Eileen Grimshaw watching the release of the man they’d spent twenty years blaming for their child’s death. The Sam Williams who’d been haunted by those faces every night for a decade, who’d let his career slide without much caring and hardly put up a fight when Brooks-Powell turned the screws and Elizabeth Maurier applied the coup de grace.
Not many people knew that version of the trouble. Claire knew. A friend or two. And Elizabeth Maurier herself, as it happened, but she wouldn’t have told her daughter.
And yet Elizabeth had dragged me back in. She’d have known, if I was working on her memoirs, that I’d have to relive that case. The case that made my name and broke my spirit in same moment. The case I’d spent years trying to forget. Hardly the action of someone who liked me.
I changed the subject once more. I’d walked into that one. I was more cautious this time.
“Oh, Lizzy, have you heard about someone called Connor?”
She screwed up her face and gazed at me, thinking, and I realised I wasn’t going to get much out of her. She was drunk enough to forget her own name, let alone a word in a diary she’d probably never seen.
“No,” she said, after a pause long enough to eat the desserts she’d either forgotten to make or forgotten to serve. “No, but the name rings a bell. I think the police might have asked me about it.”
“OK,” I replied. I was about to go on, to ask her about the diary and whether they’d kept that from her, too, but something about her face stopped me. The eyes were flickering, open and shut, the mouth trembling. She was, I realised, trying to hold back tears. Connor, the police: it had brought it all back. She stood, stumbled and grabbed the back of a chair to right herself.
“I just need…” she began, paused for a sob, went on. “I just need to get online. The grief circle. They can help. Whenever it hits. They understand.”
I took her arm and helped her out of the kitchen and back down the corridor to a dark, narrow study with papers scattered on every surface, including the tops of two more of those boxes. Three thick lever-arch files with dates on them sat atop a third.
A fourth box, however, was open. I glanced inside, as she brushed more papers off a chair and took a seat at a makeshift desk (two more boxes, a tablecloth draped artfully over them) with a small and expensive-looking laptop on top. Books. The box was full of books. I reached in and pulled two out, identical paperbacks, an amateurish cover featuring a woman facing an aged image of herself in a mirror against a solid black background. Lizzy was tapping slowly on the laptop, and I chanced another look in the box. More of the same. Dozens of them. Hundreds, if the other boxes were the same.
I remembered. I remembered Elizabeth’s fury, the shouts we’d heard behind her closed door, her daughter’s look of horror as she emerged and saw us all slink guiltily back to our desks, what we had overheard written all over our faces.
Her “slim volume”, Lizzy had called it. Her own poems, published at her own expense. She had drawn on her inheritance (her father had died when she was still a girl, her portion of the estate held in trust; she had worked secretly and cleverly on the trustees to engineer the release of the funds). She had opted for a good-sized run with the most expensive cover and trim she could find, and it was clear to everyone but her that she’d been exploited by the vanity publisher she’d been so delighted to sign with – Gordon’s just so excited, he’s expecting enormous demand, she’d said, breathless with excitement herself. When it was all over she’d spent a great deal of money, and Elizabeth had been incandescent with rage, angrier than I had seen her before or since, far angrier than the sunlit autumn afternoon on which she’d fired me for tarnishing the reputation of her firm. Lizzy, I recalled, had sold not a single copy, had, at her mother’s insistence, sent every last one to be pulped. At least, that’s what she’d told Elizabeth.
But here they were. Released from the past. For all that Lizzy had buried and belittled that part of her life, she could not forsake her “slim volume”.
Lizzy was sobbing again, great slow heavy tears like the raindrops before a storm. And tapping away on her machine at the same time. I left the poetry – it wasn’t like I was going to sit there and read it – and took up position behind her, with a good view of the screen. I coughed, loud and deliberate – sneaking a look inside her mysterious boxes was one thing, but I didn’t want to intrude on her grief without her knowledge. She turned and gave a weak smile.
It was a chat room. I didn’t know what I’d expected, when she’d spoken of her “grief circle”, perhaps some online equivalent of a student bedroom, candles and incense and overuse of the word “love”, but it was just a chat room after all. Black background (of course) with a hint of a floral pattern, like an undertaker’s wallpaper; blue and grey boxes for users to post and comment. TCGilly spoke of waves of grief, crashing in and receding, each time a little less intense, each return a little slower to come. FatherMac advised Lizzy to “take each day one by one, and each will be easier.” StillHere talked of death and rebirth and cycles of life. Therese invited Lizzy to remember happier times. All of them repeating the old, time-worn clichés, all of them apparently unaware that everything they were saying had been said a million times before. I watched for a few minutes as Lizzy tapped away, faster and faster, replying individually to each comment, each reply creating its own thread. Maybe that was the point. Maybe getting lost in a hundred new conversations, each heading in a slightly different direction, maybe that was enough.
She knew I was there, still – or had she forgotten? I coughed again, twice, but her gaze wouldn’t shift from the screen. Her fingers were moving so fast now it was impossible to track her words without watching the screen – clearly the alcohol hadn’t impaired her typing ability. I gave up watching and went to the kitchen, poured myself another glass of wine, and returned to the living room and the armchair. I sat back and closed my eyes and let everything flow through me, the grief circle, the trouble, the poetry. Elizabeth Maurier. But every image was overlaid with four others, four bodies, four pools of blood, four sets of severed organs. I hadn’t mentioned Martins’ board to Claire – she was back to ignoring me and walking out of the room as soon as I entered, or turning up the volume on the TV so she didn’t even have to hear me try to get through to her. I’d done what I could to get her talking, yet again. I’d even resorted to trying to rile her, telling her to get on and do something before Jonas Wolf died of old age. She’d ignored that, too. I hadn’t mentioned the board to Rich Hanover, either, although that would have been the easy way to achieve Colman’s aims. Hanover had emailed me just a couple of hours after I’d seen him in the café to ask whether I’d reconsidered my position on talking to him about Elizabeth. I’d ignored him the same way Claire was ignoring me, a sad, lonely cycle of passive aggression. Hanover hadn’t mentioned the other victims in his email, just Elizabeth, so I assumed he didn’t know about them. But I knew. I’d done what I could to forget about that board and bury those images. But nothing coul
d help me do that. Not even Lizzy Maurier.
Some time later – I didn’t think to check precisely when – Lizzy walked in and I woke with a jolt. The tears had dried, but the face was still pale and the eyes wide. There was a glass in her hand, the rich amber of whisky or brandy. She started talking before I’d fully come round, pausing only to sip on her drink and holding out her free hand when she did so, to forestall interruption.
“She was a wonderful woman, though, Sam, wasn’t she? She was wonderful. So clever. So full of achievement. Her brother died, did you know that, when she was a child, and she didn’t let it destroy her, she just went on and did what she could for everyone else, she fought so hard, I wish she could have fought at the end, I wish she could have fought for herself.”
The words came fast but slurred. She was drunker than she’d been before I’d fallen asleep.
“And they cut out her tongue, can you believe that, they cut out her tongue and they put it on the floor next to her, apparently they did that before she even died, she’d have seen it, she’d have died looking at it, her own tongue on the floor next to her, who would do something like that? Do you know the myth of Philomel? Of course you do. You probably read it at school, didn’t you? Ovid?”
I didn’t know what kind of school she thought I’d gone to, but we certainly weren’t reading Ovid at mine. She carried straight on, either ignoring my shrug or taking it as affirmation.
“And then, there’s Titus Andronicus, I’ve edited one of the latest versions of that, one of the more disregarded plays, very underrated.”
That one I’d heard of, at least, if only because I remembered an old English teacher telling us that if we wanted to be entertained by sex and violence we should stop listening to “gangster music”, as he put it, and pick up this particular Shakespearean tragedy. Severed heads. Children baked in pies.
“They all have one thing in common, Sam,” she continued. The pitch and volume had increased, a shrill whistle into a head that was already starting to ache. “A woman is raped and then her tongue is cut out to prevent her from identifying the rapist. Tereus, in the original. Philomel is prisoned in this lonely den, she says, and then she weaves a tapestry which tells the story of what’s really happened, and she and her sister, they kill the son, his son, Tereus’ son, they feed him to his father, and then Philomel turns into a nightingale so she can sing, finally. And the silence is broken. But my mother never got to sing. And her tapestry, that was everything else, everything else she did, that was her life. That’s what we’re doing now. Weaving her tapestry. She was a wonderful woman, Sam. But.”
She stopped, finally, and looked at me, for so long I found myself fidgeting under her gaze. It seemed she was waiting for a response.
“But what?” I asked.
She waited, again, and when she spoke it was slower, quieter, more measured.
“I’m not stupid, Sam. You know that, at least. Don’t you?”
I nodded. Disturbed, certainly. Unpredictable. But not stupid. Definitely not stupid. She went on.
“I know what everyone says. I know what they think of me.”
I doubted any two people thought the same thing about Lizzy Maurier, but I kept my thoughts to myself.
“I can see it, when they look at me, when they mutter. It wasn’t just Elizabeth Maurier who got her tongue cut out. That’s what they’re saying, isn’t it?”
She was watching me intently, her eyes unblinking, and I tried not to flinch or cover my mouth or do anything that suggested I knew what she was talking about. Surely Martins hadn’t told her about the other murders? But there hadn’t been another tongue, had there? Unless there were more bodies and more limbs Martins didn’t know about. I frowned and tried to look blank and hoped Lizzy was drunk enough not to see the deception.
“It’s me, isn’t it? It’s me they’re talking about. I had a voice. And it was silenced,” she said.
It was her. Nothing to do with the bodies. Nothing to do with Martins. Just Lizzy Maurier and her poetry and her insistence on seeing significance and connection where there were just coincidence and words. Elizabeth Maurier’s tongue had been cut from her dying body. Lizzy Maurier had been told to stop wasting the family fortune on poems. No significance. No connection. And now the tears were back.
“I need to go to bed, Sam,” she said, and looked away from me. I picked up my coat from the floor, where it had fallen when Lizzy stumbled against the chair it was hanging on. I turned back towards her, to offer a consoling word or even a hug, and she reached out and dragged me in to her, hard, desperate.
“Put me to bed, Sam. I need you to put me to bed.”
Put, I thought. Not take, which would have been unambiguously dangerous. But this was still uncertain ground. Put me to bed. I took her by the arm and led her down the corridor to her bedroom. I glanced at her, as we stumbled past boxes and bounced off walls together. Drunk, her face had lost its tightness and her eyes their disconcerting intensity: she wasn’t unattractive, with her petite features, her dimpled chin, her long dark hair. But she wasn’t for me. Not with Claire at home, if you could call it home, if you could call us lovers any more, it had been so long; not with Lizzy the way she now was. Drunk was one thing. Drunk, in mourning, unstable: even the worst of me wouldn’t stoop that far.
I wondered if I was reading too much into her request, but as we reached her bed she pulled me towards her again, her mouth opening in invitation. I turned at the last moment, a quick slip and roll, and pushed her gently down until she was sitting on the bed. I wasn’t imagining it. I wondered why, whether anyone would have done, whether it had to be me, whether this was why Brooks-Powell hadn’t been invited to dinner. If it was me, it was nothing to do with looks or charm. Probably a final revenge on her mother, who had apparently spent her last weeks trying to get close to Sam Williams without success. Lizzy had unfolded, before me, had come as close as she’d come in years to breaking her silence. But this particular act took two, and I wasn’t dancing.
“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she muttered, and smiled sheepishly at me from the bed. “And mother would probably have approved, this time.”
She fell back and into sleep in seconds. I tugged the duvet from beneath her and draped it over her, wondering all the while what the whole evening had been about and how once again I’d misread signals and misjudged intentions. And what she meant by “this time”.
On the way out I stopped in the study and pulled out the lever-arch files. They were heavy and it was raining, but I had a thick coat and there was a taxi rank at the end of the road. She’d told me she planned to show me the documents, after all. Of course, she’d intended to screen them all first, but I doubted there would be anything worth screening.
And if there was, all the better.
8: Pain
I SHOULD HAVE known it wouldn’t be so easy. I should have known he’d be there, Rich Hanover, standing across the road leaning against his bike under a yellow streetlamp that picked out the raindrops on his hair.
“Sam!” he cried, as if we were old friends and he hadn’t been expecting to see me. I ignored him, fastened the top button of my coat, and turned away. But within a second he was there, in front of me, walking backwards, dancing, almost, grinning and firing questions at me. I hadn’t drunk as much as Lizzy Maurier, but I’d drunk a lot, and Rich Hanover dancing in front of me was doing strange things to my head.
“Something, Sam?” he said, and I shook my head. He stopped walking, forcing me to stop, too, to turn to the side, slowly and deliberately on the narrow, slippery pavement. He stuck with me, mirroring my every step. I saw his lips move but couldn’t understand the words.
“Morning sherries?” he said, or at least that was what it sounded like. I shook my head again and kept moving. The taxi rank couldn’t be far now.
“A couple of cavorting beneficiaries?”
This time the words were clearer and I stopped, confused. He stepped up to me and grinned.
&n
bsp; “You and Lizzy Maurier, mate. A couple of cavorting beneficiaries. Do you like that? Came up with it myself. Sounds like a decent headline, right?”
“Fuck off,” I replied, and started walking again, Hanover always just a few steps in front. Tantalus, I thought. In reverse. It wasn’t just Lizzy Maurier. I remembered some of that classical stuff too.
“Oh come on, mate. I’m just messing with you. I wouldn’t write that kind of shit. At least, not if you give me something decent instead.”
I stopped again and took a breath. I needed to end this.
“Listen, Hanover – ”
“It’s Rich.”
“Fine. Rich. Whatever you want. But this,” I gestured behind me, at the world at large, at the half of London I was walking away from, at Lizzy’s flat in particular. “This isn’t important. This isn’t even interesting. This is a private matter between me and a woman who’s still mourning her mother. With no cavorting involved.”
I tried to smile as I wound up, something friendly, conciliatory, but I sensed more of a grimace on my lips.
“Right,” he replied. “Got you. Just a private matter. Not interesting. You and Elizabeth Maurier’s daughter alone in her flat while your girlfriend’s tucked up in bed at home. Alone. At least, I think she’s alone. What do you reckon, mate?”
I took another step, a bigger one, and turned and used my right arm and Lizzy’s files to force a path by him so that I was finally past him, in front of him, nothing but clear, journalist-free air between me and the end of the street.
“I hope you left her alive, though, Sam.”
He’d stopped. I was five, six paces past him. But now I stopped too, and turned.
“Lizzy Maurier. I hope she’s OK. Not dead. Not like that last one.”
