Blood From Stone

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I think the earlier suicide might have influenced her in some way,’ Peter said. ‘She copied it in certain respects, but I very much doubt if shame had anything to do with it. She regarded defending people as a mission, a good use of talents, a fight for justice for the underdog. Shame doesn’t come into it. Probably not part of her psyche at all, and why she couldn’t understand its existence in your sister, except for something to be exploited. It would have to be a far worse sort of shame than getting someone wicked released – she revelled in that. It’s what’s known as winning; it’s the opposite of losing. Look, I’m sorry. It’s hardly kind of me to talk to you like this, but the reason it was such a lucky chance for me to meet you is because the whole thing haunts me and I can’t let go of it, very unprofessional, I know. It’s as if he won out over everybody. Infected every life he touched, you know. Even Shearer’s.’

  Hen felt she was being used in a way she didn’t understand and was irritated rather than angry. She had just about lost the habit of being angry. How upset could he really be? It wasn’t his sister who had died last year. He had never been mauled by Ms Shearer in court.

  ‘You’re upset, and everyone else you know is bored with you talking about it, is that it?’ she said, jeeringly. ‘So you mug someone on a train, just because you think you’ve seen a fellow obsessive who’ll listen to you for the price of a bottle of wine? Not particularly sensitive, Mr Friel, especially if that someone is me, sister of the first deceased, on her way home from a visit to still-grieving parents who can’t bear the sight of me, because I remind them of her and they blame the whole thing on me, and oh, shit . . . I’m going to cry. And I’ve got no money, and my business is on the rocks, and what the fucking hell, you want to discuss it like it was something for a thesis? Just because that harridan jumped to her death and you feel guilty about something? Oh, get a life, what do you really want?’

  She thought for a dreadful moment that he was going to clasp her in his arms, or seize the hand which was delving into the carpet bag for a cigarette, forgetting no-smoking laws. Instead, she could see through the mist that he was looking crestfallen and holding out a capacious handkerchief which she seized from him. She could tell by the feel that the cloth was fine linen and could see that it was an interesting shade of blue. It was nice to the touch; she would have accepted it as a gift, anytime, and she sniffed it, instinctively, the way she always did with cloth. There was a smell of lavender.

  ‘What the hell’s this?’

  ‘Sorry. One of my sister’s table napkins. I’ve just been to her kid’s party, didn’t know I’d got it. Must have put it in my pocket.’

  Kid’s birthday party? A young uncle.

  The mist cleared and she wiped her eyes on sweet-smelling linen, drained the glass of wine and watched him pour the next. No more apologies from him; if he had not had any plan for this conversation in the first place, he had one now, without room for sentiment or sympathy.

  ‘I want to get rid of a ghost,’ he said. ‘And I did want to apologise for the magnificent cock-up we made of that case. And I do have a professional interest, but basically, I want to know what happened, and that’s all really. I hate getting part of the truth and not all of it, as if one ever could. There was so much evidence we couldn’t use, for instance. There was so much missing evidence. They couldn’t call all sorts of stuff after so much evidence was disallowed, and I can’t bear only knowing half of it, and yes, I do want to write a thesis. And I’m probably in the wrong job. Not my business to know about the background, but I do want to know what really happened. And all the stuff that Angel suppressed. Stuff that he’d hinted at and thought that she might have had, only she didn’t. You must know more than I do. I only know what I saw on paper. It isn’t over, you know, because he’s out there, doing it again, just like he did before.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Raping, debasing, stealing. Kidnapping, disfiguring if necessary. Life-poisoning. Another victim. There were three before Angel, two running alongside. He’s a con man, that’s what he does and he isn’t anything like old yet.’

  He sat back, embarrassed by his own gabbling, but not enough to stop.

  ‘And you thought you might discuss it with Marianne Shearer,’ she said. ‘Only now, you can’t. So that leaves me.’

  ‘His modus operandi is this,’ Peter went on. ‘He finds a vulnerable, self-conscious woman, flatters her, seduces her, makes up a story of poor, poor me, gets her to part with her money and then keeps her prisoner, working for him, because she’s too weak to run for cover. Once she’s down, she’s down. In the hands of a competent Defence Counsel, the story’s reversed, so that it’s she who’s the predator, she who gives him no alternative but to leave her obsessive self; she who is the unreasonable tyrant. He was so credible, I could have believed him, if it weren’t for the others. We got a bit bogged down in similar facts, didn’t we? Sorry, how would you know, you weren’t in the room during the legal arguments. Shearer and that spineless judge won them all. I want to learn. It does tend to make one ruthless. I want to know what Angel was like and what evidence you suppressed. I really, really want to know. And, since you’re never going to be a witness ever again in a case involving your own sister, you might feel free to tell me.’

  ‘Can I keep this?’ she said, folding the sweet-smelling napkin into her fist.

  ‘Please do,’ he said.

  She sipped the wine, clutching the napkin as if it was a lucky charm. She quite liked this insensitive objectivity and she was sick of people not wanting to know. Sick of hiding things from Mum and Dad. It made her talk as if a dam had burst.

  ‘So many lies get told when people are feeling guilty,’ she said. ‘Is there ever such a thing as an entirely innocent victim? Angel was sweet, but she wasn’t perfect, nobody is. She was amazingly affectionate and everyone loved her, but she found it difficult to stick at things. She was my little sister and I was the bruiser. I left home as soon as I could; Angel tried one thing and another and kept going back. She always needed reassurance about everything, all the time, it was as if there was a big hole in the middle of her. Angel was always picked up and hugged and she got to rely on it. It was a kind of spoiling, really, because she was always treated as if she was special until she knew, not so deep down, that she wasn’t. It’s pointless trying to analyse her, but she was a whole mass of insecurities by the time she met Rick Boyd. She’d been on half a dozen training courses, failed the lot and this one was for learning how to be a carer. Boyd worked for the taxi firm the college used. He brought her home a few times . . . well, you know the rest.’

  ‘Not what made her into a victim.’

  She crumpled the napkin in her hand, then straightened it out and folded it neatly, trying not to cry, brushing away tears before they fell, hating him and wanting to tell him he knew she could sew, and then saying something else.

  ‘Angel was always hung up about her appearance. She hated almost every aspect of it, with the surprising exceptions of her hands and feet and she was very vain about those. Anyway, she was always trying to change the way she looked. She thought she was ugly and fat, but she wasn’t really, she was just ordinary with an ordinary weight problem. Rick cured that, didn’t he? She wasn’t so fat by the time he’d finished with her. She never had an ounce of dress sense, and she wouldn’t be told. She should have stuck to sewing, like me. She was waiting all the time for someone to wave a magic wand and make her feel beautiful. I guess he did that. She was . . . needy.’

  He waited but she said no more.

  ‘I see. Just his type, then. Like the others who wouldn’t talk. Insecure, immature.’

  She nodded, miserably, cross that he might imagine she had not thought of that, when she thought of it all the time. She closed her hand into a fist.

  ‘I wish I understood him,’ she said. ‘I can understand being a con man, making a woman adore you, getting sex and adoration for nothing, extracting money from credulous parents for his so-called
business, doing all that. Mum and Dad have a storage business, they’d done all right. They were so pleased she’d found someone personable, they would have given him anything, and did. I can see the money angle, but why did he have to be so cruel? Why this power kick, why debase her, why put her in prison and disfigure her, when she would have done anything he wanted for another promise? Why didn’t he just leave her?’

  ‘Because she’d got wise?’ he suggested. ‘Because she was going to leave him, is that why? Nobody leaves Rick Boyd.’

  ‘Dead right, they don’t. Not even his QC. And Angel wouldn’t have done either, if I hadn’t pitched up. She’d got way beyond being able to leave, even if she wanted to. They’d been gone a year, supposedly working together at this mythical bar in Birmingham and she’d long since stopped calling home because he’d taken her mobile. There was no bar: she had a two-bit cleaning job in a pub and he took the money, rationed it out in pence. Then one night, I think it was soon after he chopped off her finger, she phoned me, from the job. She phoned because he’d left and she thought he wasn’t coming back. She wanted me to find him. I went the next day. You know what I found.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not exactly. I know what you said you’d found.’

  ‘Bloody lawyers. You never believe what you hear.’

  ‘We can’t afford to.’

  Hen poured the last of the wine into her own glass and put the napkin in the carpet bag. Now she had run out of words and held on to the watch she wore on a piece of ribbon round her neck. He noticed that the ribbon was red and gold and she herself was a mass of colours. He was slow to notice, but when he did, absorbed every detail. She did not seem to mind his scrutiny. She was calm after storm, spring after winter, a woman composed for the witness box.

  ‘There’s one thing about Angel you have to know, Mr Friel. She wasn’t very bright and she wasn’t pretty, but she was loyal and sweet-natured. She was born to look after people, should have got a job looking after animals, something simple. She may not have believed in herself, but she was utterly incapable of telling a lie.’

  ‘You must have loved her very much,’ he said.

  She was shaking her head, wincing at the cliché. Love, yuk.

  ‘No, not all the time. She was exasperating and there were times when I actually disliked her, but I wanted the best for her. Look, I wanted her to give evidence because that was the only thing which would give her back her dignity and stop her being a victim, and also because she had the power to stop him doing it again. I thought she had an absolute duty to use her experience to put him in prison for a long time and I was going to make sure that she did. Only the worst happened. Your bloody Ms Shearer used every trick in the book to spin it out, knowing every delay would make Angel more of a nervous wreck than ever. He knew that and she knew it too. The final trick was to take my evidence first; it gave her more fuel to undermine Angel before she even appeared and it kept us apart. And then she made her look a fool. Angel’s worst nightmare comes true. She wasn’t going to be believed. She was being accused of being a liar, which was the one thing she wasn’t, and she was being exposed for everything she feared she was. A clinging wretch of a woman who’d never grown up and was willing to drag a man down into her own dirt. A madwoman who would mutilate herself to make him stay.’

  ‘He reversed it, didn’t he?’ Peter said. ‘She was demented and he was sane. Very clever. He made himself a mirror image of her. I don’t think it would have worked, you know, if only she’d had the strength to go on. It would all have become clear when he gave his evidence, we could catch him in so many lies. He was her diametric opposite, one of those who’ll lie about everything even when there’s no need. If only she’d completed her evidence. There was no real case without her. Not even with you.’

  He sounded genuinely sad. Hen did not know if this was pity, or regret for an opportunity missed. She was feeling cold, but oddly grateful for finding her tongue. She touched the handle of the carpet bag, reminding herself of its presence, wanting to go, wanting to stay, needing to explain and not knowing what.

  ‘If Angel had completed her evidence, then she would have to see herself as others saw her. The ultimate, stupid victim. I think anything was better than that. She may have wanted to end it all, she may have wanted just to sleep herself into oblivion, I don’t know. She just could not bear to go back into that courtroom. There should have been screens . . . there should have been every protection fucking Shearer argued away. There shouldn’t have been Boyd’s fake illnesses, there shouldn’t have been a weak judge allowing all those delays. Don’t tell me you don’t know that. And I should never have let her out of my sight, not let her go home with Mummy and Daddy, to be put to bed and told she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do. Look, I must go home myself. Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Can I see you again? This is where I am.’

  She put the card he gave her into the bag and smiled. With both of them standing, the top of her head was level with his shoulder and he was unnerved to notice how small she was. Her sister had been a strapping girl, once. The sort a kind aunt would have referred to as bonny. They bore no resemblance to one another at all. He walked down the road with her, wondering if he dared offer to see her home, or if that added to his impertinence. No, Peter, don’t push your luck. You know where she lives and she might, just might, phone you. Saturday evening crowds were gathering, looking for warmth on another cold, January night.

  ‘Can I get you a taxi? I’ve kept you late,’ he said, hurrying along beside her.

  ‘No. I don’t do taxis, except for work for carrying things.’

  She wanted rid of him now and he felt awful, leaving her, as if he was letting one of his nieces cross the road on her own.

  ‘What exactly do you do, Henrietta?’

  Not a good question. He remembered what she did. Something menial and dull. Shearer had sneered at it.

  They had stopped at a bus stop and he could see one waiting at the next traffic light, ready to pull up and take her away.

  ‘Me?’ She sounded surprised at the question, sticking her hand out for the bus, not looking at him. ‘Me? Oh, I look after things. Clothes are so much more reliable than people. It’s all in the trial transcript. She gave me a job description, didn’t she? You can look up my website: Frockserve.com. You could do with a bit of scrubbing up yourself.’

  She was looking him up and down with a glimmer of amusement; she in her mass of muted colours, and he, bland and rumpled and egg-stained. ‘And,’ she added as the bus slowed and a cyclist cut across, slowing it further, giving her the chance of the last word, ‘don’t think I don’t know your game, Mr Friel. You don’t care about my sister or me. It’s Marianne Shearer you care about. Your club, your kind. Your brotherhood.’

  He stood rooted to the spot, because she was right.

  The bus rolled her towards home. Henrietta Joyce pulled out the emerald square and sewed a few more stitches. Then she pulled out the lavender-smelling napkin and blew her nose on it, thinking how people imagined she was always in control of herself just because she seemed as if she was. They would make unconscious judgements about her because of the clothes and the way she sat, long before they had even really looked, but everybody did that with everybody. If manners maketh man, colours maketh woman. She decided that despite the doggy eyes and the egg on the shirt, she did not like Peter Friel for accosting her on a train in the evening of a dark day and pretending he cared.

  Damn Peter Friel and her own need to talk. Damn the woman for jumping. It made her question everything she had done, as if she had ever stopped. Angel would have come home and licked her wounds, Dad said.

  Which wounds do you mean, Dad? A missing finger? A terrible affliction if you needed to sew. Perhaps I felt that more than she did. That would have been the worst thing, for me.

  She walked twenty yards from the bus stop and took the key out of the pocket of the coat he had noticed last of all, which didn’t help him any, sinc
e she was proud of this homemade coat, slept in it many a time and the thing came out brand new. She had wrapped Angel in it to take her away. She opened the door, and thought, yes, her parents were right, it was high time to come home. There was a long march upstairs, past the empty shop premises on the ground floor and up, up, up. She had the top two floors and the thing she called the laboratory in the basement. You had to watch against moths, detect the smells, behave with decorum. There was a small nest of rooms in the attic which was hers alone. Bedroom, living room, kitchenette. That was all Angel needed, then, or so it seemed.

  Forget Angel. Hen had been away for two weeks: there was work to do.

  She sniffed the air in the kitchen, which was stuffy but clean. Jake, the old man who once lived here, still had a presence not quite displaced by the other, more recent ghost. There was still a missing space where a treasured coffee percolator had been and the sound of his kind, scolding voice, saying, NO, not that way, this way. It was her business now, he said; he was sick and tired of it. She missed him.

  Hen moved into the bedroom, took the card Peter Friel had given her out of the carpet bag and put it on the table by the bed. She still needed to talk about it, and he was right, they didn’t know the half of it. If he was that fascinated by the subject, maybe he could be her unpaid therapist. After all, she had exhausted everyone else. None of it was real life, not any more.

  Out of nowhere, a strange feeling of peace and homecoming stole over her. This really was home now, and she need not share it with anyone else, not even phantoms, spectres and memories. She hurried from the kitchen, down the stairs with the key and unlocked the door of the floor below, fumbled for the switch with her eyes closed only so that she could open them again.

  Lights, action, spectacle, sensation. A workroom full of colour; a red cloak edged with purple hanging against the far window, a shimmering shawl over her chair and the halogen bulbs illuminating a rack of gorgeous skirts and dressed in the hues of a dozen subtle rainbows. The brash and the sophisticated, garments for tarts, queens and bishops and actors keeping company with one another, waiting for her in neat orderliness, a vision of loveliness. Cloth of silver and emerald silk, and a wedding dress that shone with an ivory sheen. Aladdin’s cave. It was a room of dreams and she sighed with relief.