‘Hey, Jan.’
The movement was so quick Charley didn’t understand it until she tottered around in his direction and blood sheeted across the kitchen, some of it lashing him. His mind went blank, but he saw that she’d opened half of her throat.
‘Jan! No! Jesus!’
His foot slipped on the blood as he jumped off the chair but he got a hold of her and tried to clamp the gaping wound shut and somehow save her. But the blood squirted and trickled out of his fingers. Jan’s eyes were rigid, fixed on him, and they were like a couple of hard blue stones, cold, unseeing, remorseless.
He pounded on the neighbour’s door, shouting. He got on the phone, trying to explain to 911. He was back with Jan, trying to hold her together.
You had this life in your hands.
His voice seemed distant, like heavy balloons bouncing off the walls and ceiling. Charley felt as if he were coming apart, breaking up in random cells and molecules and atoms, that he was scattering, exploding right out of himself and flying away in a million different directions at once.
This life too.
22
Mr Patrick Pond worked from an office above a tea shop on Kilburn High Road, but that was altogether too close to Becky’s flat. It was highly unlikely that Oliver would run into her on the street, especially in the middle of a workday, but he didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. He didn’t even want Nick and Jonna to know that he was in London, otherwise they’d expect him to stay at their house in Kensington and there would have to be dinner and talk – and none of that would do.
So Oliver checked into the Bonnington Hotel on Southampton Row and arranged to meet Mr Pond in the bar at four o’clock that afternoon. The place was fairly deserted, which perhaps was due in part to the ersatz Polynesian décor. The England—West Indies cricket match was on the television and a few businessmen who had slipped out of the office early were watching it.
Mr Pond was just ordering a drink when Oliver came in. There was no mistaking the man. Tall, thin, cadaverous, he had a face like an old shoe that had never dried out properly. He wore a grey cloth mac, and looked every inch the unglamorous detective who would spend his entire working life in a chilly office over a greasy tea shop in Kilburn. Still, he had Joe Barone’s tentative recommendation, and he had sounded competent enough when Oliver spoke to him on the telephone the week before. He had a cool but firm handshake. Oliver paid for the drinks and they settled down in a banquette well away from the Test match.
‘Now then.’ Mr Pond extracted a slim grey folder from his briefcase and pushed it along the table to Oliver. ‘This is your copy of our report. Shall I summarize it for you now?’
‘Thank you.’ Oliver picked up the folder and looked at the typed label on the front of it. Subject: Mary Margaret Rosalind Brodie. And beneath that, Client: Oliver Spence. Oddly enough, the name Pond & Associates was absent. ‘Yes, please do,’ Oliver said, setting down the folder again. He already felt the makings of another disappointment.
‘Right. I understand that Miss Brodie, or Miss Rodgers, as she apparently now calls herself, has been in North America these past three years.’
Oliver nodded. ‘I believe so, yes.’
‘We were unable to trace any record of her here in that time period, so it sounds about right. Her last known address in this country was Durham city, and she was there for approximately five years altogether.’
‘Not Newcastle?’
‘No, Newcastle was earlier. But, as you may know, Newcastle and Durham are only about twenty miles apart.’
‘Yes.’
‘While she was living in Durham she had a number of low-wage jobs. Barmaid, fast-food waitress, that sort of thing. Shared a flat with some other shop girls, but in the last couple of years she had her own bedsitter. She had a modest bank account but no credit, no property, no assets worth mentioning.’
‘She was that poor when she left Britain?’
‘Not quite.’ Mr Pond allowed himself a brief smile. ‘Just two months before she left, she deposited a cheque for the sum of twelve thousand pounds.’
‘Aha.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry that we were unable to determine the source of that money but this kind of information is rather difficult to come by, as I’m sure you can appreciate.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Oliver was beginning to be annoyed by Mr Pond’s somewhat fussy way of speaking.
‘In any event, it was apparently all legal and above board. Within a few days of depositing that cheque, Miss Brodie remitted a portion of it to the Inland Revenue.’
‘That’s her.’ Roz was certainly a stickler about paying her taxes, wherever she might be.
‘She closed the account shortly after that,’ Mr Pond went on, ‘and presumably used the balance to finance her move to North America. But if I may jump back a bit, there are some things you should know that will explain why she was in Durham.’
‘Yes, please.’ Oliver lit a cigarette, as Mr Pond declined the offer of one. ‘Carry on.’
‘Miss Brodie was born in Glasgow twenty-four years ago now. Mother, Ellen Rodgers, later Ellen Muir, later Ellen Brodie, and finally Ellen Rodgers again. Now deceased, by the way. Alcohol, drugs and too many of the wrong men, which probably explains why your Miss Brodie’s father is listed as unknown.’
‘I see.’
‘They bounced around a bit. Glasgow, Belfast, Glasgow again for a while, Hull and Doncaster, before they eventually landed in Byker, which was an old slum neighbourhood around the Byker Bridge in east Newcastle.’
‘Yes.’ Oliver knew vaguely where that was. He and his band had been to Newcastle twice, but the pubs they’d played were in the city centre.
‘Now, when they got there the slum-clearance scheme in Byker was fairly well advanced and they didn’t qualify for new housing, so they soon drifted further on down to Scotswood, which was the worst of the worst slums in Newcastle. I know what I’m talking about, by the way. I’m a displaced Geordie myself.’
‘Is that right?’ Oliver took it to mean that he was in for some tedious anecdotes of local history.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mr Pond continued. ‘Of course, it’s been a good few years since I’ve been back, but I know the place quite well. Scotswood was named for the many Scotsmen who moved down for the jobs at Swan Hunter and on the docks, so it’s not surprising that Ellen Rodgers should end up there. But by then shipbuilding was well on its way into the grave, and what was already a grim area was rapidly becoming much nastier and more violent. You had hundreds, thousands of men idle, hanging about in the streets and drinking up their dole money in the working-men’s clubs, and they were not at all enlightened when it came to the way they treated their women. Abuse, neglect, hunger—’
‘How many children did she have?’ Oliver interrupted.
‘I was just coming to that, but I wanted you to have a clear picture of the place, how bad it was. I do think it’s important. It was something terrible, especially for the womenfolk.’
‘An urban wasteland.’
‘One of the worst,’ Mr Pond said. ‘Ellen Rodgers had been living in places like that all her life, but Scotswood was really the bottom of it for her. Now, according to the records, she had five children. In each case, the father was listed as unknown. Ellen was a full-time project for the social workers. There were men coming and going at all hours. The last job she held was in Doncaster, a kiosk at the race-track, and she soon lost that over a suspicion of petty thievery. Skimming the take, no doubt.’
‘About the children.’
‘Yes. In Scotswood she limped along on social security and any cash she could pry loose from the man of the moment. Not all of the children lived with her all of the time, some came and went on a fairly regular basis. They were farmed out to relatives in Glasgow, or removed to temporary foster care. You see, Ellen herself was often away for brief periods, in jail for some minor offence, or in hospital when the drink got out of hand, or else she’d run off for a quick romance with s
ome fellow and the children would be left alone until she turned up again. Now, whenever Ellen was absent your Miss Brodie was the one who acted as substitute parent. There was an older brother, John, but he was in trouble or missing most of the time. There were three other children, two young lads and one girl.’
At last. ‘Oona.’
Mr Pond smiled. ‘Clare Oona Muir, yes.’
‘What is this business with the names?’ Oliver asked. ‘Why are there so many of them? And yet you said that the fathers were listed as unknown.’
‘Right. Apparently Ellen used whichever name she fancied at any given moment,’ Mr Pond explained. ‘There was a Mr Muir and a Mr Brodie, and she was married to both of them, but neither stayed around for very long, and there were other men on the scene, before, during and after the marriages. So Ellen insisted that she could never be sure which man fathered which child. She gave the children surnames on the basis of proximity of birth to marriage but it was merely a gesture. I did manage to locate and speak to one of the social workers who dealt with the family for a time while they were living in Scotswood.’
‘Did you?’ Oliver was beginning to warm to Mr Pond.
‘Yes, and she remembered them quite well. She said that one of Ellen’s many nasty tricks was to use this uncertainty over the identity of the fathers as a weapon against her children, to keep them dependent on her.’
‘I’m not sure I follow that.’
‘As the children got older, she didn’t want any of them to run off looking for Dad, you see. So Mary Margaret—’
‘Roz.’
‘Rosalind, yes. She was left in no doubt that although she had been given the name Brodie, Mr Brodie was not her father and had no interest in her. Same thing with Clare Oona and Mr Muir. And so on, with the others.’
‘Sounds like Ellen was quite a piece of work.’
‘Monster, is the word the social worker used.’
‘Really.’
‘She was the queen bee at home, I gather. She not only kept the children tied to her but, as I said, she was often missing for days and sometimes even weeks. But her absence had the effect of increasing their need and dependency. She was negligent most of the time, tyrannical and demanding, but she knew how to dispense love and attention in spot-doses, just enough to keep everyone in a very tight orbit around her.’
‘Like supplying an addict.’
‘That’s it, exactly,’ Mr Pond agreed, with a nod.
‘What about physical or sexual abuse?’
‘I did ask. The social worker refused to discuss it in any detail, but she did say that in situations like that you can take it for granted that there’s some level of violence, whether it be spankings, slappings, whippings or more severe beatings. And she said that psychologically it was an incestuous environment. But the sexual abuse, if there was any, most likely came from the men who passed through, Ellen’s boyfriends. Again, it’s not all that uncommon in such a disordered home for the boyfriend to have a go at one or more of the children. Behind the mother’s back or, sad to say, often with the mother’s tacit acceptance. Of course, we don’t know for certain that it happened but—’
‘It probably did.’
‘Exactly,’ Mr Pond said. ‘Don’t forget, in that type of an environment, mean and cramped, with no moral centre, the children grow up very quickly, if you know what I mean.’
‘You did well to uncover this much information.’
‘I had a bit of luck getting on to the social worker, but it really wasn’t that difficult. There’s plenty of people up there who remember this particular family. Only too well.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was just ten years ago this very summer.’
‘What was?’
‘When Clare—’
‘Oona.’
‘Yes, Clare Oona Muir. She killed another child.’
Oliver exhaled and sat back. He glanced around the room, a little bit of Tahiti in Bloomsbury, and he caught the eye of the barman. He nodded for another round of drinks. Oh yes, this was better than he had thought, far better than he had dared to hope. Oliver lit another cigarette.
She was like him.
‘So. Please go on.’
Mr Pond extracted a second grey folder from his briefcase, and pushed it across the table towards Oliver. It was a good deal thicker than the folder on Roz. ‘This is your copy of our report on Clare Oona Muir. Unfortunately, because she was so young, she had no public record in terms of employment or bank accounts and the like. So what we did for you was assemble a set of newspaper clippings about the case. It caused quite a stir at the time, so there’s a fair bit of coverage.’
‘That’s fine,’ Oliver said. How odd. Ten years ago he had been living in London, or was just about to make the move, and yet he couldn’t recall hearing anything in the news about the murder. But no doubt he’d been wrapped up in his own life and the band’s business. And he didn’t know himself yet.
‘Cases of children killing other children are still rare in this country,’ Mr Pond continued. ‘There was the recent one in Liverpool, but prior to that I think you might have to go all the way back to this one.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘Oona was eleven years old at the time. She and the other kids she hung around with used to play on a piece of waste-ground behind their street, near the river. A lot of concrete rubble, a few demolished buildings, an abandoned warehouse, overgrown with weeds – a miserable place, grim and barren. The children played there by day and at night the local teenagers took over, drinking and partying, a bit of drugs, a bit of sex and so on. I suppose it was the only place they had to go. A certain number of adults also used parts of the place. Derelicts, the meths-drinkers, the homeless – some of them slept rough there.’
‘Right.’
‘One day, it seems, Oona lured a four-year-old girl away to a secluded corner and bashed her head in with a stone or a piece of brick. The victim was a neighbour’s child and there wasn’t any feud between them, so there was no rhyme or reason to it, but you wouldn’t expect it to make much sense when the murderer is eleven and the victim four.’
‘Did she admit to the crime?’
‘Oh, I think so. Yes,’ Mr Pond replied. ‘The one quote I remember had her saying more or less that she wanted to see what somebody looked like when they were dead.’
‘Christ.’
‘It might make a certain kind of sense to a child that age, but only a child raised as she was.’
‘Was her sister there that day? Rosalind.’
‘I think the most you could say about any of Ellen Rodgers’ children was that they were either half-brothers or half-sisters to each other.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
‘But to answer your question, yes, Rosalind was in the same general area at the time of the murder. But she was with some of the other neighbourhood kids, and they were all at a fair distance from the exact spot where the killing took place. Remember, she was a good three years older than her sister, she was a teenager. Rosalind no doubt had her own, different crowd of pals.’
Oliver nodded. ‘So there was never any question—’
Mr Pond shook his head. ‘No.’ Oliver was glad. ‘Rosalind was actually the closest thing to a success story in that family. She held them together when the mother was away or acting up, she finished school and, as I said, she held jobs and gradually moved up a bit, to the point where she could manage to pay the rent for a bedsit of her own.’
‘Yes.’
‘That twelve-thousand-pound payment is a puzzler but it does suggest some business sense. I think she may have received it as payment for a newspaper interview. We never located one with her featured, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.’
‘That’s all right,’ Oliver said. ‘I’m not really interested in the exact source of that money.’
‘Well, then, let me just finish up on Oona now.’
‘Please.’
‘Considering her age,
and the results of the various mental tests and psychiatric evaluations they did on her, Oona was never brought to trial or convicted of any offence.’
So she had not illegally entered the United States, and she really didn’t have a criminal record.
‘It’s a murky area of English law, or was at that time,’ Mr Pond went on. ‘I’m not sure about now. But obviously they were not about to turn her loose, as if nothing had happened. She’d have been strung up from the nearest lamp-post overnight. There were a lot of hard feelings in the community and around the rest of the country. There was another odd fact that came into play, however. England has no facilities for the detention of children so young who commit serious crimes.’
‘None?’
‘None at all.’
‘So what did they do with her?’
‘She was sent to the remand home for children in Low Newton. It’s not a criminal facility but it does house troubled children. It wasn’t a popular decision. Some people thought it was a little like putting the fox in the hen-house, but there weren’t any good alternatives. Low Newton is located in Durham county.’
‘Aha. That’s why Roz moved to Durham.’
‘Yes, she broke away from the family circle, such as it was, two years later, when she turned sixteen. News reports indicate that she visited Oona as often as regulations allowed.’
‘How long did Oona remain at Low Newton?’
‘The best part of seven years,’ Mr Pond replied. ‘She was released when she reached the age of eighteen, as they no longer had any legal grounds for holding her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Legally she was detained for her own protection,’ Mr Pond replied patiently. ‘And for psychiatric treatment. But she had not been convicted of any crime because she’d been declared unfit to stand trial, on mental grounds. When Oona turned eighteen she became an adult under the law, and other factors came into play, some of which worked in her favour.’
‘But why couldn’t they just commit her to an adult facility for further treatment at that point?’
Fog Heart Page 24
