‘One of the others sees a plume of dust rising in the distance and shouts a warning.’
‘What was it?’
‘They call them Casspirs, troop carriers like huge iron pigs. Koevoet use them so they know the crowbar men are coming.’
‘Crowbar men?’
‘Koevoet means crowbar in Afrikaans.’
‘What did you do?’
‘The women hid me down this new latrine they’d dug.’
‘That can’t have been a nice experience.’
‘No, but I can see what’s going on by lifting a sort of lid contraption.’
‘So the soldiers, what did they do?’
‘They line everyone up at gunpoint and start screaming Wit man! Wit man!’
‘Meaning what?’
‘White guy, white guy… me.’
‘But how did they know you’d be there?’
‘Informers, double agents. Not easy for outsiders to hide in a bush war… spies everywhere. You’re always worth something to someone.’
‘But the soldiers didn’t catch you?’
‘No, and when they can’t find me, they get angry, all psyched-up.’
‘That must have been terrifying.’
‘Then something moves or spooks one of them and they panic and just open up.’
‘They shot these people, you mean?’
‘Yes… that’s what they did.’
‘But they were women - ’
‘ - five of them and a little boy.’
‘And you saw all this happen?’
‘Like watching an old newsreel… Nazis shooting people they didn’t consider human.’
‘That’s so wicked, Mac… so wicked.’
‘The earth where they were… it’s reddish anyway but this, you wouldn’t believe… then the silence takes over… not even the goats are bleating. It’s like it’s a film set and someone should shout cut but no-one does.’
‘Mac, this cannot have been your fault.’
‘You don’t think so? Do you know what I did next?’
McCall rose to his feet almost in anger.
‘I take photographs, that’s what. Can you believe that, Hester? I stand over the dead and the dying, those poor holy innocents who’d been dumb enough to help me and I take pictures of them… and it’s the kid I can’t get out of my mind… his chest opened up from right to left… this vivid pink furrow ploughed through his brown skin getting ever deeper till the bullet exits and rips into his left arm and leaves it hanging by a few tendons. But that’s not the worst of it, Hester… he’s still alive and he’s looking at me, looking into whatever passes for my soul and his eyes don’t leave mine. What had I become? Was my ego worth any of this?’
‘Death and wars go together, Mac.’
‘No, these people wouldn’t have died if I’d not been there. I was the target, not them.’
‘You were only doing your job.’
‘So my job was to get people killed for a bigger and better story, was it?’
He looked away as if unable to face her anymore and leaned his head hard against the standing stone as if it might heal.
But the eyes of a dying child had seen him for the pimp he had become. What was the point or purpose of his journalism now? Whatever wrongdoing McCall uncovered, nothing ever changed. The greedy got fatter, the corrupt still inherited the earth and the weak were cut down as they always had been.
‘Mac, you have to carry on reporting the appalling things which happen in our world or there will be no change. You have to make a pact with your conscience.’
‘How the hell can I? I can’t raise the dead.’
‘No, but those bullet cases on the mantelpiece in your room - ’
‘What about them?’
‘ - they came from this village, didn’t they? Why keep them?’
But McCall wouldn’t - or couldn’t - reply.
Nineteen
The streets around Paddington were blown with noxious traffic fumes and greasy blasts of hot air from fast food joints. McCall paid his cab then hurried through a noisy surge of late night diners to meet Lexie off the last train from Bristol.
She came down the platform in jeans, a vintage black velvet jacket and carrying a repro Gladstone bag. His first instinct was to wave but he held back for reasons he didn’t care to admit.
He wanted to watch her unseen, even if it felt like stalking. Time changes everything and everyone. In the end, it’s all about trust… or the lack of it.
She’d only been away thirty-six hours - but in Bristol, that hinterland of her existence of which he knew nothing. Yet Lexie hadn’t questioned McCall about his last two decades. Maybe his missing years presented less of a problem.
As she got closer, he thought her face drawn and grey under the artificial lights of the concourse. Delayed shock could mean she was still sleeping badly. But he detected something else, too - some preoccupation outside of loss.
Lexie always said they had the empathy of twins. He stepped in front of her and apologised for being late.
‘Doesn’t matter. Let’s get to Etta’s flat. I’ve had a phone call from the council.’
*
Lexie spent yet another a fitful night in Etta’s disturbing bedroom so McCall left her sleeping. He showered and dressed then went into the street so she wouldn’t hear him ring Hoare. To write anything on Ruby, McCall still needed a sit down with Benwick.
‘You’re out of luck, chum,’ Hoare said. ‘He went on leave last Friday.’
‘Dammit. So what progress on Ruby?’
‘The search goes on but you know the odds against a happy ending, don’t you?’
McCall went back into the flat and poured Lexie a glass of mango juice from a carton in the ’fridge. She raised herself up on her elbows, barely awake and unsure if the black magic weirdness around her was real or imagined. Then she slumped back.
‘Dear God, it’s not a dream after all.’
‘No, we’re stuck with it.’
‘But not for much longer.’
A housing officer had rung Lexie in Bristol, gently asking when Etta’s flat might be vacated. He was dealing with a long list of homeless families.
For Lexie, the apartment held memories she wished she didn’t have. Etta’s possessions held little value, sentimental or otherwise.
Most of her furniture could be given to a housing charity and the flat emptied by the end of the week.
Lexie now padded to the bathroom, pale and naked. On another day or in another place, McCall would have gone to her and laid her down somewhere soft, somewhere warm. But in that unsettling room where so crude a living had been earned, love would only ever feel like lust. He went to straighten the bed covers instead.
There was a bloodstain where Lexie had slept, vivid red and perfectly round like the mark of a plague sore. He covered it over with the duvet but said nothing. Lexie came back towelling herself, long hair dripping down her back and onto the carpet.
‘I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat in the kitchen.’
‘There’s a café down the street and the woman who runs it was friendly with Ruby.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘She told me. I had a coffee in there on the day Etta was found.’
Lexie finished dressing and said there was something she had to do before they went for breakfast. She took hold of the satanic goat poster and tore it from top to bottom. McCall saw the satisfaction in her eyes, ripping the offending image into ever-smaller pieces.
They would have left then but on the wall where the poster had been were three tarot cards, taped side by side.
‘That’s weird,’ Lexie said. ‘What are these doing here?’
The cards showed the devil, the hanged man and the sun.
‘They’re just cards. What of it?’
‘Nothing you’d understand, I suppose.’
‘Your sister was into things nobody understands.’
‘I told you, I read the tarot and th
ese cards arranged like this, well it’s sort of strange.’
The devil had great bat-like wings, twisted horns and menaced a man and woman chained to the rock where he crouched.
The second card showed a yellow-haired man hanging upside down from the tree of life by his right foot while the third depicted the smiling face of the sun beaming over a child on a white horse.
‘This is just a bit of fun at the fair, Lexie, nothing more.’
‘To you, maybe. I wonder when Etta put them here… and why.’
McCall knew he had to be patient. Lexie was all about theatrics, creating dramas for personal effect. But she was also grieving and trying to rationalise Etta’s suicide.
‘Tarot cards have meanings if you’ve the knowledge to read them.’
‘What are these supposed to be saying, then?’
‘There’s a message here… a message about why she was going to kill herself.’
McCall couldn’t hide his disbelief.
‘Look, you’re upset but you mustn’t try to explain the inexplicable.’
She ignored him and drew her fingers across the surface of each card, knowing the last hands to hold them were her sister’s.
‘See this, McCall? The devil could show how Etta felt she was being manipulated, tied down against her will and even enslaved by forces stronger than her to control.’
‘Really?’
‘And the hanged man is a card of sacrifice. It might represent her ending a struggle, putting self-interest aside and being a martyr for a higher cause and the sun and the child could suggest the truth being realised, of Etta finding sense amid the chaos and somehow releasing Ruby.’
‘Releasing Ruby from what?’
‘From whatever she and Etta had been caught up in but was beyond Etta to stop.’
‘Lexie, love - you could interpret these pictures to mean anything you wanted in any situation, prove black was white… anything.’
‘If you were unscrupulous, yes. But why did Etta hide them under a poster like this?’
‘I’ve no idea and I know it’s very painful but I can’t see any of this helping you to come to terms with her death any more than why she killed herself.’
*
They ate scrambled eggs on toast at Café Leila. Leila fussed over McCall and smiled sadly when she heard Lexie was Ruby’s aunt.
‘My heart, it break for you,’ Leila said. ‘I send prayers for Ruby all nights.’
Lexie wanted to take a first – and last – look at where Etta died and Ruby played. To McCall, each new day revealed a softening in Lexie’s tough exterior. She linked his arm as she had after the funeral.
They crossed to the footpath round the reservoir and its faux castle disguising the pumping station within. There was no wind to disturb the trees. All was settled and still. Neither of them spoke.
A plane banked on its long descent to Heathrow and in the far distance, an emergency siren rose above the drone of traffic. Lexie crouched at the water’s edge and broke the placid surface with the tips of her fingers.
It was as if she was back on the banks of the Severn once more, communing with all she had lost. McCall kept his distance as he had then, yet still watching over her. But in the quiet of the moment came the barely audible voice of a child.
Six little mice sat down to spin, Pussy passed by and she peeped in.
What are you doing, my little men? Weaving coats for gentlemen.
McCall turned to look into the scrub of laurels and thorn bushes by the boundary fence behind him. There was no one to be seen.
‘Did you hear that… like a kid reciting a nursery rhyme?’
‘I did, yes. There must be a playground around here.’
Shall I come in and cut off your threads?
Still the child’s words came to them, faintly as if from far away and long ago. Lexie got to her feet and took McCall’s hand. She was more puzzled than afraid but there was something spectral and disembodied about the tinny little voice. They stood together, completely alone – alone on the sloping bank of grass and weeds where Etta had been laid, shadowed beneath a great overhanging chestnut tree.
No, no, Mistress Pussy, you’d bite off our heads.
It was Lexie who looked up first, looked heavenwards and caught a glimpse of her - a scrap of a girl astride a branch in the canopy of leaves high above them, singing songs to herself as she always had.
Twenty
Hoare had just left his flat when McCall rang his mobile to tell him about Ruby’s bizarre reappearance in the place from where she’d most likely vanished.
‘Sitting in a tree?’ Hoare said. ‘Even we couldn’t make this up, Mac.’
‘No, but like much else in this affair, it doesn’t make sense.’
‘I’ve been trying to tell you all along; it’s a hell of a tale. The papers will love it.’
‘Ah, slight problem there. Can you hold off releasing anything for a few days?’
‘Am I hearing you right - a hack wants a press officer to sit on a bloody good story?’
‘Ruby’s in a bit of a state. God knows what’s been happening to her so the last thing we want is the poor kid getting hounded by the pack.’
‘Look, I’m on a day off and Benwick’s away so I’ll tell his standin what’s happened then he’ll contact you and maybe something can be sorted out.’
*
Rush hour traffic inched its way through the streets around King’s Cross Station. Part of Gray’s Inn Road had also been coned off for re-surfacing. It was quicker for Hoare to walk to his meet than go by cab.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Ruby. Had she really been abducted or did this strange kid just run away and go feral for a couple of weeks? And where did her conjuring trick leave Benwick’s suspicions about the mother?
All Hoare’s instincts told him McCall wanted to scent-mark Ruby’s story before any rival got a bead on her. As exclusives went, it’d be a smasher - provided the poor little stray could tell her own story. Still, the cops had trained interviewers who’d wheedle it out of her.
But if it ever came to court, how could any prosecution rely on testimony from a child as away-with-the-fairies as Ruby Ross?
Benwick’s mobile was turned off and he’d not left a holiday number. By coincidence, Hoare had received a postcard from him that morning - a view of a sandstone church on a hill in a place called Blackrod. He’d not signed it but Hoare recognised the handwriting if not the cryptic message. All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
The closer Hoare got to Benwick, the further away he seemed. But his secretive habits could have a simple explanation. Many a married cop he’d known played the field. No job provided better cover for supping and tupping till all hours.
Gulling wives - or husbands - was a breeze for detectives capable of standing in court, hand on bible, swearing to tell the truth… or a version of it cooked up in the canteen earlier.
Hacks weren’t even at the races when it came to fibbing.
*
Alone in an ornate booth within the Victorian glory of the Princess Louise, Hoare was halfway through a bottle of Mouton Cadet and the Daily Telegraph crossword.
The first drinkers of the day were coming in from another bright, Bloomsbury morning - academics from London University or the British Museum, men of suit and substance just needing a little help to face the world. He felt their equal these days.
Life as a grubby crime reporter had been like those parasitic birds in TV nature programmes, pecking for grubs off the hides of a big, bad tempered animal. Not anymore. He’d gone up in the jungle.
Hoare mused on this waiting for his one-time colleague, Teddy Lamb. He’d been the wiliest industrial correspondent of his generation - in bed with every side but screwed by none.
This made him beholden to nobody so he knew more than just where the dirty sheets went to be laundered.
Teddy arrived looking every inch a pinstriped city gent with a pink carnatio
n in his buttonhole to match the Financial Times he carried to complete the illusion. They exchanged friendly insults and fell into happy reminiscences about their foot-in-the-door days, their buy-ups and stitch-ups and sins committed when too young to care if they’d left all their bridges in flames.
‘It’s tragic how Fleet Street’s gone to the dogs.’
‘There’s no fun anymore,’ Hoare said. ‘It’s those bloody bean counters.’
‘Shakespeare wouldn’t write about killing lawyers these days, it’d be accountants.’
Hoare bought another bottle and chose to forget what had brought about the early exits of all the other members of their formation drinking team.
‘To bigger and better exclusives,’ Hoare said. ‘And may all your exes be passed.’
Teddy allowed himself a sly smile.
‘Always a delight to stagger down memory lane with you old chap, but what is it you’re really after?’
‘A little favour, Teddy. That’s what.’
‘Not going to land me in the arse-kicking cupboard, is it?’
‘On my life, no. I’m just needing to check if you’ve still got your little black book of indiscretions.’
‘Might have. Why?’
‘Excellent. Let me top you up.’
*
An idea blew into Lexie’s tired head like the spore of a poisonous plant and took root in a sunless corner. If life plotted out as it did on “Inspector Morse”, Ruby wouldn’t have been found alive.
Lexie might then have played the distraught aunt of a murdered child whose mother had just committed suicide. It would’ve been a tough role yet one she’d subconsciously rehearsed every day since Ruby went missing.
But reality rarely came with a script. It had no need of stars, only an endless supply of walk-on victims of circumstance, trying to cope as best they could.
After only half a day acting as a standin mother, Lexie was stressed to the point of exhaustion. It was gone ten before Ruby finally screamed herself to sleep - and not in her bed, either.
She’d made a nest of blankets and pillows beneath the kitchen table and burrowed into it. Such was the end of the oddest of days.
Ruby’s resurrection was as unlikely as it was life changing. Lexie’s plans – maybe McCall’s, too – were in disarray from the moment they heard her faintly robotic voice high up in that tree.
The Convenience of Lies Page 10
