Shatter jo-3

by Michael Robotham

  ‘A second sighting was made at 15.45. A delivery driver for a dry cleaning firm saw a fully naked woman walking along Rownham Hill Road near St Mary’s Road.

  ‘A CCTV camera on the western approach of the bridge picked her up at 16.02. She must have walked along Bridge Road from Leigh Woods.’

  The details are like markers on a timeline, dividing the afternoon into gaps that can’t be accounted for. Two hours and half a mile separated the first and second sightings.

  The sergeant flicks through the CCTV images so quickly it appears as if the woman is moving in juddering slow motion. Raindrops have smeared the lens, blurring the edges of each print, but her nakedness couldn’t be sharper.

  The final photographs show her body lying on the deck of a flat bottomed boat. Albino white. Tinged with lividity around her buttocks and her flattened breasts. The only discernible colour is the red of her lipstick and the smeared letters on her stomach.

  ‘Did you recover her mobile?’

  ‘Lost in the river.’

  ‘What about her shoes?’

  ‘Jimmy Choos. Expensive but re-heeled.’

  The photographs are tossed aside. The sergeant shows little sympathy for the woman. She is a problem to be solved and he wants an explanation- not for peace of mind or out of professional curiositybut because something about the case disturbs him.

  ‘The thing I don’t understand,’ he says, without looking up at me, ‘is why did she go walking in the woods? If she wanted to kill herself, why not go straight to the bridge and jump off?’

  ‘She could have been making up her mind?’

  ‘Naked?’

  He’s right. It does seem bizarre. The same is true of the body art. Suicide is the ultimate act of self loathing, but it’s not usually characterised by public self abuse and humiliation.

  My eyes are still scanning the photographs. They come to rest on one of them. I see myself standing on the bridge. The perspective makes it look as though I’m close enough to touch her, to reach out and grab her before she falls.

  Abernathy notices the same photograph. Rising from his desk, he walks to the door, opening it before I get to my feet.

  ‘It was a bad day at the coal face, Professor. We all have them. Make your statement and you can go home.’

  The phone on his desk is ringing. I’m still in the doorway as he answers it. I can hear only one side of the conversation.

  ‘You’re sure? When did she last see her?… OK… And she hasn’t heard from her since? Right… Is she at home now?…

  ‘Send someone to the house. Pick her up. Make sure they get a photograph. I don’t want a sixteen-year-old identifying a body unless we’re bloody certain it’s her mother.’

  My stomach drops. A daughter. Sixteen. Suicide is not a matter of self determination or free will. Someone is always left behind.

  4

  It takes me ten minutes to walk from the Boat House in Eastville Park to Stapleton Road. Avoiding the industrial estates and the slime-covered canal, I follow the concrete brutality of the M32 flyover.

  The plastic shopping bags are cutting into my fingers. I put them down on the footpath and rest. I’m not far from home now. I have my supplies: meals in plastic trays, a six pack of beer, a slice of cheesecake in a plastic triangle- my treats for a Saturday night, purchased from a Paki grocer who keeps a shotgun under his counter, next to the porn magazines in their plastic wrappers.

  The narrow streets cut in four directions, flanked by terraces and flat-fronted shops. An off-licence. A bookmakers. The Salvation Army selling second hand clothes. Posters warn against kerb crawling and urinating in public and, I love this one, putting up posters. Nobody takes a blind bit of notice. This is Bristol- city of lies, greed and corrupt politicians. The right hand always knows what the left is doing: robbing it blind. That’s something my dad would say. He’s always accusing people of ripping him off.

  The wind and rain have stripped leaves from the trees along Fishponds Road, filling the gutters. A street sweeping machine, squat with spinning wheels, weaves between the parked cars. Shame it can’t pick up the human garbage- strung-out slum kids who want me to fuck them or buy crack from them.

  One of the whores is standing on the corner. A car pulls up. She negotiates, throwing her head back and laughing like a horse. A doped horse. Don’t ride her, mate, you don’t know where she’s been.

  At a cafe on the corner of Glen Park and Fishponds, I hang my waterproof on a hook beside the door and my hat next to it, along with my orange scarf. The place is warm and smells of boiled milk and toast. I choose a table by the window and take a moment to comb my hair, pressing the metal teeth hard against my scalp as I pull it backward from my crown to the nape of my neck.

  The waitress is big-boned and almost pretty, a few years shy of being fat. Her ruffled skirt brushes against my thigh as she passes between the tables. She’s wearing a plaster on her finger.

  I take out my notebook and a pencil that is sharp enough to maim. I begin writing. The date comes first. Then a list of things to do.

  There is a customer at a table in the corner. A woman. She’s sending text messages on her mobile. If she looks at me I’ll smile back.

  She won’t look, I think. Yes, she will. I’ll give her ten seconds. Nine… eight… seven… six… five…

  Why am I bothering? Uppity bitch. I could wipe the sneer off her face. I could stain her cheeks with mascara. I could make her question her own name.

  I don’t expect every woman to acknowledge me. But if I say hello to them or smile or pass the time of day, they should at least be polite enough to respond in kind.

  The woman at the library, the Indian one, with hennaed hands and disappointed eyes, she always smiles. The other librarians are old and tired and treat everyone like book thieves.

  The Indian woman has slender legs. She should wear short skirts and make the most of them instead of covering them up. I can only see her ankles when she crosses her legs at her desk. She does it often. I think she knows I’m watching her.

  My coffee has arrived. The milk should be hotter. I will not send it back. The waitress with the almost-pretty face would be disappointed. I will tell her next time.

  The list is almost finished. There are names down the left-hand column. Contacts. People of interest. I will cross each of them off as I find them.

  Leaving coins on the table, I dress in my coat, my hat and my scarf. The waitress doesn’t see me leave. I should have handed her the money. She would have had to look at me then.

  I can’t walk quickly with the shopping bags. Rain leaks into my eyes and gurgles in the downpipes. I am here now, at the end of Bourne Lane, outside a gated forecourt, fenced off and topped with barbed wire. It was once a panel-beaters or some sort of workshop with a house attached.

  The door has three deadlocks- a Chubb Detector, a five pin Weiser and a Lips 8362C. I start at the bottom, listening to the steel pins retracting in their cylinders.

  I step over the morning mail. There are no lights in the hallway. I removed the bulbs. Two floors of the house are empty. Closed off. The radiators are cold. When I signed the lease, the landlord Mr Swingler asked if I had a big family.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why do you need such a big house?’

  ‘I have big dreams,’ I said.

  Mr Swingler is Jewish but looks like a skinhead. He also owns a boarding house in Truro and a block of flats in St Pauls, not far from here. He asked me for references. I didn’t have any.

  ‘Do you have a job?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No drugs. No parties. No orgies.’

  He might have said ‘corgis’, I couldn’t understand his accent, but I paid three months rent in advance, which shut him up.

  Taking a torch from on top of the fridge, I return to the hall and collect the mail: a gas bill, a pizza menu, and a large white envelope with a school crest in the top left corner.

  I take the envelope to the kitchen and leave it sitt
ing on the table while I pack away the shopping and open a can of beer. Then I sit and slide my finger beneath the flap, tearing a ragged line.

  The envelope contains a glossy magazine and a letter from the admissions secretary of Oldfield Girls School in Bath.

  Dear Mrs Tyler,

  In reference to your request for addresses, I’m afraid that we don’t keep on-going records of our past students but there is an Old Girls website. You will need to contact the convenor Diane Gillespie to get a username, pin and password to access the secure section of the site containing the contact details of old girls.

  I am enclosing a copy of the school yearbook for 1988 and hope it will bring back some memories.

  Good luck with your search.

  Yours sincerely,

  Belinda Casson

  The front page of the yearbook has a photograph of three smiling girls, in uniform, walking through the school gates. The school crest has a Latin quotation: ‘Lux et veritas’ (Light and Truth).

  There are more photographs inside. I turn the pages, running my fingers over the images. Some of them are class photographs on a tiered stage. Girls at the front are seated with knees together and hands clasped on their laps. The middle row girls are standing and those at the back must be perched on an unseen bench. I study the captions, the names, the class, the year.

  There she is- my beloved- the whore’s whore. Second row. Fourth from the right. She had a brown bob. A round face. A half-smile. You were eighteen years old. I was still ten years away. Ten years. How many Sundays is that?

  I tuck the school yearbook under my arm and get a second can of beer. Upstairs a computer hums on my desk. I type in the password and call up an online telephone directory. The screen refreshes. There were forty-eight girls in the leaving year of 1988. Forty-eight names. I won’t find her today. Not today, but soon.

  Maybe I’ll watch the video again. I like watching one of them fall.

  5

  Charlie is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, dancing with Emma in the lounge. The music is turned up loud and she lifts Emma onto her hip and spins her round, dipping her backwards. Emma giggles and snorts with laughter.

  ‘You be careful. You’ll make her throw up.’

  ‘Look at our new trick.’

  Charlie hoists Emma onto her shoulders and leans forward, letting the youngster crawl down her back.

  ‘Very clever. You should join the circus.’

  Charlie has grown up so much in the past few months it’s nice to see her acting like a kid again, playing with her sister. I don’t want her to grow up too quickly. I don’t want her becoming one of the girls I see roaming around Bath with pierced navels and ‘I-slept-with-your-boyfriend’ T-shirts.

  Julianne has a theory. Sex is more explicit everywhere except in real life. She says teenage girls may dress like Paris Hilton and dance like Beyonce but that doesn’t mean they’re making amateur porn videos or having sex over car bonnets. Please, God, I hope she’s right.

  I can already see the changes in Charlie. She is going through that monosyllabic stage where no words are wasted on her parents.

  She saves them up for her friends and spends hours texting on her mobile and chatting online.

  Julianne and I talked about sending her to boarding school when we moved out of London, but I wanted to kiss her goodnight each evening and wake her of a morning. Julianne said I was trying to make up for the time I didn’t spend with my own father, God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting, who sent me to boarding school from the age of eight.

  Maybe she’s right.

  Julianne has come downstairs to see what the fuss is about. She’s been working in the office, translating documents and sending emails. I grab her around the waist and we dance to the music.

  ‘I think we should practise for our dance classes,’ I say.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They start on Tuesday. Beginners Latin- Samba and the Rhrrrrumba!’

  Her face suddenly falls.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I can’t make it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to get back to London tomorrow afternoon. We’re flying to Moscow first thing Monday morning.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Dirk.’

  ‘Oh, Dirk the Jerk.’

  She looks at me crossly. ‘You don’t even know him.’

  ‘Can’t he find another translator?’

  ‘We’ve been working on this deal for three months. He doesn’t want to use someone new. And I don’t want to hand it over to someone else. I’m sorry, I should have told you.’

  ‘That’s OK. You forgot.’

  My sarcasm irritates her.

  ‘Yes, Joe, I forgot. Don’t make an issue out of it.’

  There is an uncomfortable silence. A gap between songs. Charlie and Emma have stopped dancing.

  Julianne blinks first. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be back on Friday.’

  ‘So I’ll cancel the dancing.’

  ‘You go. You’ll have a great time.’

  ‘But I’ve never been before.’

  ‘It’s a beginner’s class. Nobody is going to expect you to be Fred Astaire.’

  The dance lessons were my idea. Actually, they were suggested by my best mate, Jock, a neurologist. He sent me literature showing how Parkinson’s sufferers benefit from practising their co-ordination. It was yoga or dancing lessons. Both if possible.

  I told Julianne. She thought it was romantic. I saw it as a challenge.

  I would throw down the gauntlet to Mr Parkinson; a duel to the death, full of pirouettes and flashing feet. May the best man win.

  Emma and Charlie are dancing again. Julianne joins them, effortlessly finding the rhythm. She holds out her hand to me. I shake my head.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ says Charlie.

  Emma does a bum wiggle. It’s her best move. I don’t have a best move.

  We dance and sing and collapse on the sofa laughing. It’s a long while since Julianne has laughed like this. My left arm trembles and Emma holds it still. It’s a game she plays. Holding it with both hands and then letting go to see if it trembles, before grabbing it again.

  Later that evening when the girls are asleep and our horizontal waltz is over, I cuddle Julianne and grow melancholy.

  ‘Did Charlie tell you she saw our ghost?’

  ‘No. Where?’

  ‘On the stairs.’

  ‘I wish Mrs Nutall would stop putting stories in her head.’

  ‘She’s a mad old bat.’

  ‘Is that a professional diagnosis?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I say.

  Julianne stares into space, her mind elsewhere… in Rome perhaps, or Moscow.

  ‘You know I give them ice-cream all the time when you’re not here,’ I tell her.

  ‘That’s because you’re buying their love,’ she replies.

  ‘You bet. It’s for sale and I want it.’

  She laughs.

  ‘Are you happy?’ I ask.

  She turns her face to mine. ‘That’s a strange question.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about that woman on the bridge. Something made her unhappy.’

  ‘And you think I’m the same?’

  ‘It was nice to hear you laughing today.’

  ‘It’s nice to be home.’

  ‘Nicest place to be.’

  6

  Monday morning. Grey. Dry. The agency is sending three candidates for me to interview. I don’t think they’re called nannies any more. They are carers or childcare professionals.

  Julianne is on her way to Moscow, Charlie is on the bus to school and Emma is playing with her dolls’ clothes in the dining room, trying to put a bonnet on Sniffy our neurotic cat. Sniffy’s full name is Sniffy Toilet Roll, which is again what happens when you give a three-year-old the naming rights to family pets.

  The first interview starts badly. Her name is Jackie and she’s nervous. She bites her nails and touches her hair constantly as if
needing reassurance that it hasn’t disappeared.

  Julianne’s instructions were clear. I am to make sure the nanny doesn’t do drugs, drink or drive too fast. Exactly how I’m supposed to find this out is beyond me.

  ‘This is where I’m supposed to find out if you’re a granny basher,’ I tell Jackie.

  She gives me a puzzled look. ‘My granny’s dead.’

  ‘You didn’t bash her, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  I cross her off the list.

  The next candidate is twenty-four from Newcastle with a sharply pointed face, brown eyes and dark hair pulled back so tightly it raises her eyebrows. She seems to be casing the house with the view to robbing it later with her burglar boyfriend.

  ‘What car will I be driving?’ she asks.

  ‘An Astra.’

  She’s not impressed. ‘I can’t drive a manual. I don’t think I should be expected to. Will there be a TV in my room?’

  ‘There can be.’

  ‘How big is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Is she talking about watching it or flogging it, I wonder. I scrub out her name. Two strikes.

  At 11.00 a.m. I interview a pretty Jamaican with braided hair, looped back on itself and pinned with a large tortoiseshell clip at the back of her head. Her name is Mani, she has good references and a lovely deep voice. I like her. She has a nice smile.

  Halfway through the interview, there’s a sudden cry from the dining room. Emma in pain. I try to rise but my left leg locks. The effect is called bradykinesia, a symptom of Parkinson’s, and it means that Mani reaches Emma first. The hinged lid of the toy box has trapped her fingers. Emma takes one look at the dark-skinned stranger and howls even louder.

  ‘She hasn’t been held by many black people,’ I say, trying to rescue the situation. It makes things worse. ‘It’s not your colour. We have lots of black friends in London. Dozens of them.’

  My God, I’m suggesting my three-year-old is a racist!

  Emma has stopped crying. ‘It’s my fault. I picked her up too suddenly,’ Mani says, looking at me sadly.