The skin over my spine crept. Right there, in that warm sunny pub, I came out in goose-pimples.
Mossy gave me a worried look. ‘Was she a friend of yours, Mr Morgan?’ Oh, how many relationships can the word ‘friend’ cover?
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to have a look in that suitcase sometime.’
Mossy jerked his head at the youth. ‘You heard what Mr Morgan said . . .’
‘What, now? In broad daylight?’
‘For Gawd’s sake,’ said Mossy. ‘Shove on a long brown coat. Hold a clipboard in yer hand. Tell anybody who asks you’re from the council investigating a complaint about rats . . . use yer bloody loaf. Go on, get moving. We haven’t got all bloody day. And fer Gawd’s sake bring the right bloody suitcase.’
I glanced around the public bar nervously. But no one was taking a blind bit of notice of us. All too busy talking, swanking about the next car they were going to buy. Or how they were going to make a killing, once business improved . . . still, it was an uneasy half-hour, before the youth came back and jerked his head towards the door.
‘In the back of the van.’
‘Let’s go then.’
We left one of the back doors of the tattered van half open, for light. I knelt and undid a leather strap. The two heavy brass catches on the suitcase thumped back against the leather with reports like a gun going off. Mossy’s eyes watched me, in the gloom. Curious, genuinely worried for me and yet . . . discreet.
The odour of woman’s stuff was still strong, but gone sour, stale. Among the rumpled female garments, something glass showed. I pulled it out.
A baby’s feeding-bottle. Unwashed. Still with some pale green sediment in the bottom. And there were the little bootees, grubby, unwashed. Some bits of white terry-towelling, that on closer examination turned out to be nappies. A dried-out bottle of gripe-water.
Books. Paperbacks that I could see at a glance were French. With lurid covers that showed women oddly dated in their clothing. A cheap copy of La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Thérèse Raquin . . .
Then a tiny, dark book with hard-bound covers, but no title. I flicked open the pages. A small diary, with a week to two pages, covered in tiny writing, full of what seemed to be abbreviations. It didn’t matter, I couldn’t read French anyway. Gave it up in the third year and did art instead.
And then the letters; on cheap paper, in cheap envelopes, that didn’t look English. All addressed in a big sprawling hand that was not the hand that had written the diary. And all addressed to the same address:
Mlle Annette le Feuvre
19 Neville Road
Golders Green
Londres
Angleterre
A foreign unmarried mother. And the dates on the envelopes were ten years old. And the postmark was ‘Liège’.
Belgian. Like the dressing-table set.
Like the crucifix inside the tiny coffin. Again, in my mind’s eye, the tiny skull peered out at me.
‘Dodgy, Mr Morgan?’
I gave a warning sideways glance at the boy, who was squatting, idly picking his nose.
‘Go an’ get me a packet o’ fags, Spud!’
With ill grace, the youth leapt out of the van. He knew he was being got rid of, and resented it. We listened while his footsteps faded.
‘Very dodgy, Mossy,’ I said. ‘When we were searching the Pond, we turned up a baby’s body . . .’
He nodded. ‘Murdered. Black magic ritual or something. I heard some talk about that.’
‘There was a crucifix with the body. The police found out it was Belgian. That dressing-table set he sold me – that was Belgian as well. And this girl’s a Belgian unmarried mum . . .’
He shuddered. ‘Christ, it’s a bloody shitty world, innit? What yer going to do, Mr Morgan?’
I began doing up the suitcase. ‘I don’t know yet. I think I’d better talk to a friend of mine.’
Of course, the friend was Hermione Studdart. I rang her from the pub. She sounded bright and quite friendly. She said, ‘You wondering about Rory? I rang the hospital. He’s going to be OK. His face will be a bit of a mess for a while. And they say he’s still in shock. I had a long chat with the sister. She was nice.’
‘Something else has come up.’
‘What?’
‘Rather not say, over the phone . . .’
‘I’ll come round . . .’
I felt a sudden irrational reluctance to go home. Maybe it was shame. Maybe I didn’t want the real Hermione waltzing through my dreams of rape. ‘D’you mind if I come to you?’
‘That serious, is it? Or do you want an excuse to case my joint?’ Her voice was still friendly, playful. ‘Oh, well, come round if you must. I suppose I can rustle up some coffee. D’you know where I am? It’s just off Kensington Church Street; a mews . . . Oh, you brought me home once.’
A nice Georgian mews. And she hadn’t wasted space on a garage; her battered Metro lived on the cobbles, and where the stable had been there was a gracious little sitting-room, with cast-iron spiral stairs leading up out of it. She had some nice bits of furniture; a Georgian bureau, two spindle-backed armchairs with the pukka curved stretchers . . .
‘Don’t you dare make me an offer! It’s all family heirlooms.’ She looked cool, relaxed, casual and elegant in dark green slacks and a loose green top. She glanced at the big suitcase in my hand. ‘I asked you for coffee – I trust you’re not thinking of moving in?’
How could I ever have even dreamt of raping someone so nice, so civilized, so friendly? And yet, as I put down the suitcase, dark shadows drifted across my mind. And when I opened the suitcase, they got worse, not better.
She knelt beside it, and wrinkled her straight elegant nose.
‘You’re going down-market like an express train, Morgan.’ Then she picked up the bootees with one hand, and one of the letters with the other, pondered for a second, then said, with a face full of distress, ‘The baby in the Pond.’
I mean, she was that quick, that intelligent. She added sadly, ‘We’ve had two more little skeletons. But nothing like that. Just ordinary dumpings, over the years. But it’s very sad, isn’t it?’ Somehow, the way she said it, I knew she was thinking that she was over thirty, and without a bloke, let alone a baby, in sight. They have it a bit rough, on the quiet, these modern career women. But how could I empathize with her so, with those evil rags of dreams still drifting through my mind?
She spread the girl’s pathetic belongings around her hearthrug, gently trying to smooth out the crumplings. Her respect for them began to rebuild a whole human life before my eyes. Gay floral blouses, a white suspender-belt . . . a young and sexy girl, she must have been.
‘The letters are in French,’ I said lamely. ‘And there’s a diary . . . my French is hopeless. I thought you . . .’
She nodded, and opened a letter.
‘Ma Chère Annette . . . my dear Annette . . . once again I urge you to come home. Your father . . . has had a change of heart. He is no longer . . . angry. He misses you. I have found a family . . . a good and loving family . . . who will take the baby. They live quite near . . . twenty kilometres . . . you could go and see the child each weekend . . . they are not jealous people. It is so foolish of you . . . to imagine you can make a living in a foreign country, with the burden of a child. I urge you to reconsider . . .’
Hermione looked across at me. ‘Not much doubt what happened there . . .’
‘So why . . . kill the child?’
She took up the little diary, squinting at it, putting one finger to the outer corner of her right eye, to stretch it and help her vision. ‘Oh, God, this is hopeless. It’s as if it was written by a demented ant. And it’s more than half abbreviations . . . I can’t do anything with this, Morgan.’
She turned to the last page. ‘Oh, this last bit’s bigger and clearer. It says, “They shall have me, but they shall not have him.” Was that . . . what we found . . . a boy, Morgan?’
�
��Crittenden said they reckoned it was.’
We were both silent a long time, while she fingered and rearranged the crumpled clothing, as if in a vain desire to help.
Finally, I blurted out, ‘What d’you reckon made her do it?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ Suddenly her face was the harsh ill-tempered face she could show on site, when things were going badly.
Then she seemed to get a grip on herself; and said more gently, almost apologetically, ‘Childbirth does strange things to women, Morgan. Sometimes they get very depressed after it. Sometimes they do feel like murdering their babies . . . the strain of looking after them gets too much, and yet they can’t bear to hand them over to anybody else. And don’t forget she was alone. And probably had no job . . . money running out . . . disapproved of at home. She must have been under a hell of a strain. Under the law, it’s called “infanticide”, not “murder”. The penalties are far less severe; even the law sort of understands.’
She shook her head, as if to shake slow, bad thoughts out of it. Then turned to me and said, ‘What are you going to do – with this stuff?’
‘God knows. I can hardly take it to Crittenden and say, “a clue has turned up to your murder as a result of a burglary.” ’
‘No, I can see you’ve made difficulties for yourself, with your dodgy dealing.’ She even managed a slight wry smile that had some affection in it. ‘I suppose . . . it all happened a long time ago. And she wouldn’t make a habit of murdering babies . . . I doubt if she’s a danger to anybody else, wherever she is now, poor thing. I only hope . . . she didn’t do away with herself.’
That was a new and worrying thought that hadn’t occurred to me.
‘I could fish around Crittenden a bit . . . after all, I am entitled to an interest in this case, seeing that we found the . . . body,’ I said.
‘Yes, I’d be interested to hear what he tells you. Did her parents ever report Annette as a missing person? Did she ever turn up?’
Then, quite suddenly and briskly she was packing up the suitcase again. Putting all the dreary frightening thoughts out of her mind. ‘I’ll make you that coffee now. Always as good as their word, the City Toy Museum . . .’
We felt better after it was packed away. She offered to shove it into her outhouse, for which I was grateful. We felt better still after I’d asked her out to lunch. We got really quite cheerful over lunch. And in Regent’s Park afterwards. Our acquaintanceship, I would have said, really began to prosper. At least she was calling me ‘Jeff’, not ‘Morgan’.
I rang Crittenden the following morning, early. He’d just come on duty, I think. He kept breaking off to make sarcastic remarks to his subordinates, as they clocked in.
I started by discussing the vandalism round the site, which had got much less. The kids seemed to be losing interest in us; we had been the usual nine day’s wonder. And then, as he made the noises that indicated he was a busy man, and had other things to do with his life, I mentioned the baby from the Pond.
‘I just wondered,’ I said casually, ‘whether you ought to look up Belgian girls in the Missing Persons’ file?’
‘We did that days ago.’
‘Any luck?’
‘There were seventeen, over the three years we covered.’
‘Oh!’ I said glumly.
‘Mind you, thirteen of those turned up alive, eventually. And one dead. Strangled. But we got the bloke who did it.’
‘Three left, then?’
‘That’s what my arithmetic makes it.’
‘What were their names?’
He paused, probably to consult his notebook. ‘Helene Rigaude, last heard of in Bromley, Kent. Michelle Janvier, reported to have gone with a dance troupe to the Middle East, God help her. And one Annette le Feuvre, complete with baby. The kid was the right age . . . but she last lived over in Golders Green.’
I swallowed hard. ‘That one sounds more likely.’
‘Why do you say that, Mr Morgan?’ There was a sudden sharkish snatching tone in his voice. Policemen can seem like anybody else, for a long time, and then suddenly you get that sharkish tone.
‘Well . . . the kid.’
‘Yeah, the kid.’ His tone returned to its ordinary disillusionment. ‘Well, anything turns up, let me know, won’t you? Meanwhile, if you will excuse me, London crime is like the busy noise of London traffic. It never stops, day or night.’
I heard James’s car pull into the yard soon after that, and knew it was time to get downstairs for the working day. Instead I went to the window and watched James and Sam get out, their hands full of sandwich-boxes, and copies of the tabloids. Sam went in for the Sun; James for the more righteous Mail. They got into the workshop quickly, because it was beginning to rain, under a dark grey sky. There wouldn’t be much activity at the Pond today, if this weather kept up. And not much in my shop, either. Bad selling weather. Best selling weather is a cold sunny day. People are lured out for a walk, then feel the chill and come into the shop for a warm. I keep a good coal fire; it makes people want to linger. I offer coffee to anybody I know; loosens up their buying-spirit.
I had never felt more reluctant to go and face the world. I’d had another night of nightmares; again about raping Hermione. How can you spend a happy day with a woman, and then dream of raping and murdering her? I wondered whether, while I was with her, she dominated me, turned me into a good little boy behaving himself for the nice lady . . . and then, after we had parted, the resentment welled back up to the surface, so I dreamt of rape. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
And the Belgian girl was also making me broody . . . and the grey sky. Anyway, I got hold of myself, and went downstairs.
James and Sam were dismantling a grandfather clock I’d sold the previous Friday, to a woman in Hampstead. Sam was going up with it in the van, to set it up for her. If I knew the uneven walls and floors of Hampstead, that would take the whole morning. Sam’s a good worker, but he likes to chat the rich ladies up.
‘What you on, James?’ I asked
‘That German box-clock’s stopped again. I gave it a squirt of WD40 on Friday, but it hasn’t done the trick. Only went about four hours, I reckon. I’ll give it an hour in the paraffin bucket and go on from there. And that Dutch chandelier could do with a clean. I like doing brass on a rotten day. Cheers me up.’ He looked at the new model boat from the Pond, with less than enthusiasm. ‘You gonna get that thing hosed down outside? We could do with its room, and without its stink.’
‘Young Lenny can do it, when he finally turns up.’
‘Here he is now,’ said Sam, ‘looking like a wet Sunday.’
James gave him a sharp look, for making rude remarks about Sunday. Sam at least pretended to be an atheist; mainly, I guess, to annoy James and to while away many a boring hour with argument.
I must admit young Lenny looked pretty ghastly; very pale, and jumpy. And very slow to give us a hand with the boat. It was a handful for four, and it didn’t help that the slime on it had dried on the surface, like the top of a cow-pat, but underneath was still wet and greasy, so that your hands slid on crumpling patches of the dried stuff. It was damned heavy, too; full of silt. Worse, three of us had to stand holding it, while Lenny nipped back for the trestles; and didn’t he take his time?
‘Yeuk!’ Sam made a noise of disgust, deep in his throat, flapped his hands to try to shake the slime off them, and dived for the wash-basin, where he spent about ten minutes washing them. Then he went off, and James spent about ten minutes washing his hands. Was no one going to make a start this morning? But the stuff was unpleasant. It tightened on your skin as it dried, gave the delusion of burning the skin, like paint-stripper . . . I spent a long time washing in turn, making sure it was out of every crack and crevice . . . I thought it was odd at the time.
Then I decided to follow James’s example, and polish every bit of brass in my shop. The doorstops in the form of charging hussars were rather fun, every detail of sword and cro
ss-belts coming up beautifully. But the grain-measures (set of three) were a boring drag . . .
Then Lenny darkened the doorway; he seemed to have got himself pretty wet, even though it wasn’t yet raining more than a spot. He would hardly ever wear an apron for a dirty job, like the older men. I supposed he had a daft mother who spent endless hours washing his ragged jeans.
‘Done the outside of it,’ he said sullenly.
‘So?’ I said, tempted to be nasty in return.
‘Thought you would want to see it.’
‘Oh, all right!’ Where had all the enthusiasm gone, that had made us gather so avidly round the first little German tinplate cruiser? I suppose you can get sick of handling gold and jewels in the end, if you have enough of them . . .
It was certainly a fine model ship; a very expensive model ship. A white hull, faintly spotted all over with green algae, six feet long and a foot across. Finely-fitted deck planking, beautifully-cast brass handrails, a varnished wooden superstructure, not even beginning to rot, a white bridge, brass ventilators, all dominated by a single fat brass funnel. The glass in the windows was even bevelled, and quite perfect. And there was the brass-maker’s plate, which I knew must say ‘Ross and Makepeace’ even before I looked at it.
I turned the six-inch steering-wheel on the bridge, and the white rudder swung; I moved the handles of the engine-room telegraphs. Everything was made to work. Extraordinary.
So was the engine-room, under the hatch that Lenny had lifted off at the back. Brass feed-tanks for the methylated spirit, little pipes leading down to the burners. No chance that this one would catch fire in midvoyage. Little working pressure-gauges, and the miniature triple-expansion engine was a masterpiece of engineering, in brass, nearly a foot long and a foot high.
Oh, this was out of this world! The ultimate dream of a model boat! This was one that Christie’s or Sotheby’s would probably send to New York! A hundred thousand dollars? Two hundred thousand? The sky was the limit, once the millionaire yachtsmen got their eyes on it.
And yet all I felt was a dull hate for the thing. It was too big, too overblown. It wasn’t really a model at all. When things get too big, they cease to be models for me. Like that model of a Cunarder, ten feet long, in Liverpool Museum. You can admire it, but you can’t relate to it. A bloke could have sat on the deck of this thing, and it would have carried him around the lake, with his feet trailing in the water. What made it worse was that the real ship it was copied from couldn’t have been more than sixty foot long, the smallest kind of steam-yacht. I lost interest, beyond thinking that Hermione was going to make a lot of money. And once I thought of Hermione, those rotten rape-dreams came back like a dull toothache.
Spectral Shadows Page 15
