“Old Miss Bright?” frowned one of the policemen.
We climbed the stairs to Room Two. The curtains were drawn, and the room was in semi-darkness, but I could see at once that the wardrobe had gone. Nancy lay on the bed, thin and white-haired and really dead; the same way that Miss Coates had been really dead. Mr Pedrick and his young assistant were preparing to lift her into her coffin.
“Who’s this, then?” asked one of the policemen.
“The name’s Pedrick,” said Mr Pedrick.
“I mean the deceased.”
“Oh, mistake me for a fucking corpse, please,” Mr Pedrick complained.
“This is Nancy,” I told the policeman.
“I’m sorry?”
“This is Nancy Bright. My girlfriend, Simon’s mother.”
The constable peered at Nancy closely. “Well, you’ll have to forgive me, Mr Moore, but she looks a trifle long in the tooth to be your girlfriend. And she can’t possible be young Simon’s mother now, can she? She must be eighty if she’s a day.”
“That’s how they killed her,” I insisted. “They took everything out of her – everything. Her youth, her looks, her blood for all I know. It’s Mr Bristow. Every woman he wants becomes part of him. Mixed up inside him, almost. It’s really hard to describe until you’ve seen it for yourself.”
“Too right,” said Mr Pedrick.
“Where’s this fellow now, then?” asked the constable. “This Mr Bristow?”
“He was in the wardrobe. The wardrobe was right there, almost exactly where you’re standing. Look, you can see the mark of its legs on the carpet. And it must have been really heavy, because the marks are so deep.”
“Oh, yes,” said the policeman, rubbing the mark with his shoe. “Sherlock Holmes strikes again.”
“So where’s this wardrobe now?” asked the other policeman.
“It’s gone,” I admitted. “They’ve taken it away.”
“With Mr Bristow still inside it?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so.”
There was nothing more that I could do. The police just didn’t believe me and nothing I said could persuade them. I managed to telephone Vince and ask him to help, but apart from being ever so sorry that Nancy was dead, he didn’t want to get involved. All the same, his mum and dad drove down from Thornton Heath in their Cortina and collected Simon from Worthing Hospital, and promised to bring him up like a good young South London tyke. Nancy didn’t have a mother, and her father was in Hull, working as a printer. I phoned him up at his digs while he was trying to watch Coronation Street and he said, “I see. Well, it doesn’t surprise me,” and hung up.
A week later I called round to 5a Bedford Row to pick up my few belongings and Mrs Bristow had moved out. The rooms were being managed by a black-haired woman with a hairy mole and a bad hip. She didn’t know where Mrs Bristow had gone, except that it was probably the seaside.
I grew up, like everybody else. I got a job. I got married. The last time I went to Worthing they had demolished 5a Bedford Row and most of the rest of the town, too. I stood for a long time looking at the waste-ground of broken bricks and thinking that was the end of it.
Last week, however, I was walking through The Lanes, in Brighton, when I stopped to look at an antiquarian book and print shop in Duke Street. Right in front of me was a Victorian poster for THE GREAT BRISTOE, Prestidigitator Extraordinaire. He was supposed to be appearing at the Palace Pier, Brighton, on, June 4, 1879.
“Man of 1,000 voices! Man of 1,000 faces! The most remarkable series of Female Impersonations ever Achieved on Stage!! No Mirrors, No Trickery!! The Secret of the Arabian Harem Conjurors for you to witness in front of your eyes!”
Staring at me in the middle of the poster was a steel-engraved portrait of the man in the wardrobe. The man who could live for ever by absorbing the life and character of one young girl after another; the man in whose body the girl I had once loved still lay physically entangled. According to Mrs Bristow, she was experiencing some kind of unending ecstasy; or maybe some kind of unending purgatory, which is what unending ecstasy usually turns out to be.
I’ve never mentioned Nancy to my wife; nor to anyone else, before now. It all sounds too mad. It all sounds childish and ridiculous. But oh God, I loved her, you know; and oh God, I miss her. It hurts me so much to think of what unimaginable suffering she might still be going through now. I think of her sometimes and I still have to make an excuse and go out into the garden and sob like an idiot.
And I never, ever open other people’s wardrobes, in other people’s houses. He’s there somewhere, in somebody’s wardrobe, and believe you me, I don’t want to be the one to find him.
Saint Joan
Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme, France
Saint-Valéry lies on the Baie de la Somme, on the Opal Coast of Northern France. It is famous for its annual wild bird festival, and ornithologists come from all over Europe to spot birds, drink wine, eat moules frites, drink more wine, and spot more birds. Saint-Valéry has a well-preserved medieval center that is almost eerie in its historical atmosphere, and the remains of a 14th-century hilltop fortress where Joan of Arc was imprisoned. But there is a sadder feeling here, too: the ghosts of all the Allied soldiers who landed here during both world wars, and those who fell on the Somme.
Saint-Valéry is an ideal location for a haunting.
SAINT JOAN
On the other side of the restaurant, a woman with blue hair screamed with laughter.
David couldn’t help turning around. The whole table of old-age pensioners was rocking with amusement. “Armand, tu es si drôle!” cackled a woman with lavender-colored hair.
David turned back to Robert and Jeremy and shrugged. “I wish I understood French better. That was probably a cracker.”
“Probably dirty,” said Robert. “You know what old people are like.”
David smiled, and refilled his glass with Pouilly Fumé. He was sitting with his sons at a table by the window, looking out over the silvery flatness of the Somme estuary. In the distance, across the marshes, he saw occasional glitters of sunshine; but for the most part the day was cloudy and gray.
At the moment, the only other diners in the restaurant were the rainbow-rinsed pensioners and two men with waxy breathless faces who volubly argued with each other with their mouths full of bread.
The restaurant was crimson-wallpapered and darkly-paneled, decorated with stuffed ducks and lobster pots and a waterfall that trickled over painted plaster rocks. There were three maroon-jacketed waiters: one looked like Jacques Cousteau and the other two looked like Pee Wee Herman if Pee Wee Herman had been twins.
Robert said, “Mummy would have liked this.”
“Ah well,” David replied. “She’ll be better by tomorrow. I think it must have been that Camembert. She said it tasted funny when she was eating it.”
Jeremy was trying to scrape all of the mushroom-and-onion sauce off his poulet gran’ mère. “I wish they wouldn’t put all this glop on it,” he complained.
“Some gourmet you are,” Robert restorted. Robert, at 17, was two years older than Jeremy, and considered himself to be totally fearless when it came to food. He had even tried snails, although he had given up after the third, saying that if he was going to eat chewing-gum, he preferred mint flavor to garlic.
David said, “Here’s ours.”
One of the Pee Wee Hermans brought them two huge steaming tureens of moules marinières and a vast plateful of pommes frites. “Attention, c’est tres chaud,” he warned; but Jeremy took a frite straight away, and then dropped it in his beer because it was too hot.
“Brilliant shot,” laughed Robert.
After that, they were quiet for a while, although the French pensioners were growing noisier and noisier, scraping their chairs and laughing and arguing at the tops of their voices. David forked out mussels and dipped his bread into the oniony liquor and felt extremely at peace for the first time in months.
There was nothing very special about this pa
rt of France, the Opal Coast, apart from its beaches and its marshes and its wildlife. They had come here for only three days, simply for the quiet and the change of scenery. The weather had been dreadful, most of the time, but they had gone for walks along the promenade and up into the cobbled medieval town, and sat in cafes watching the rain trickle down the windows, drinking wine, and that had been all that they had either expected or needed.
David had recently finished a complicated eleven-month design project, updating the corporate identity of British Allied Fibres, which had meant producing a new company logo, new livery for the company’s vans, new notepaper, and even redecorating the company’s headquarters. He had just wanted to escape for a while from anything that looked like a British Allied Fibre.
He was a dark, rather Scottish-looking man of 45, a once-keen tennis-player gone to seed. Robert was unmistakably his father’s son, only an inch or two taller, while Jeremy was blonde and snub-nosed and looked much more like his mother.
They finished their meal with strong cups of coffee, and then the three of them strolled back along the promenade. The promenade was almost a mile long, very straight, flanked on one side by tall, black-painted lamp-posts, and on the other by the greasy gray banks of the Somme. There were thirty or forty little fishing dinghies moored in a line on the mud, just beginning to bob and jiggle as the tide came in.
The wind came off the Channel steady and cold, and David was glad that he had remembered his raincoat.
They passed a sad, red-brick Gothic hotel, with towers and balconies and a tangled garden criss-crossed with colorless bracken. They passed a tatty casino, closed until the summer; and a small cafe called Brasserie Jehanne D’Arc where lorry-drivers sat, smoking and drinking coffee. They paused at a small marble monument with a plaque on it which read, “On this spot, on May 13, 1940, Maurice Renaud fell to the bullets of the enemy.” Then they reached their hotel, La Colonne de Bronze, a nondescript yellow-stucco building on a tight corner of the town’s main road.
Inside, in the small gloomy bar, madame was polishing wine-glasses. She was a thirty-sevenish woman with tightly-braided hair and a sharp, vixen-like face. She appeared always to be immaculately dressed: today, in one of those boxy gray suits that French women seem to like so much. “Monsieur” she said tightly, as the door swung shut behind them.
The boys had brought some schoolbooks with them, and they went up to their room to revise for a while (and probably to wrestle). David thought that he would look in on Carole, to see if she was feeling any better, and then maybe take a walk up to the town’s medieval gatehouse, and take a few photographs.
He climbed the narrow stairs to the landing, and eased open the door of Chambre 1. The curtains were still drawn, as he had left them, and the room was overheated and gloomy. “Carole?” he said. “Carole? Are you awake?”
She didn’t answer. He closed the door behind him and tiptoed over to the bed. It was then that he saw that the orange bedcover had been neatly drawn over it, and that there was nobody in it.
“Carole?” he called. She must have felt better, and decided to get up. It was odd that she hadn’t opened the curtains, though. He went to the bathroom, and opened the door. Carole wasn’t there, either. The shower dripped monotonously into shower-tray.
He drew back the curtains. The room filled with wan gray daylight. From here, David could see across the road, to the cafe where the lorry-drivers were still sitting, and the nub of granite that commemorated the falling of Maurice Renaud.
He went back downstairs. Madame was still polishing wine-glasses in the bar. Carole certainly wasn’t here, because there were only three tables, two barstools and a potted palm, and hardly enough room to swing une chatte.
He poked his head around the door of the dining-room. Perhaps Carole had felt hungry, after a whole night of being sick, and had ordered herself some lunch. But the dining-room was silent and empty, with all the cutlery and napkins set out for this evening’s meal.
“Monsieur?” asked madame.
“Je cherche ma femme” said David. “Est-elle sortie, peut-etre?”
Madame frowned at him, looking even more vixenish than ever. “Pardonnez, monsieur, je ne comprends pas.”
“Ma femme,” David repeated. “Ce matin, elle était très malade. Elle dorme. Mais, elle n’est plus dans nôtre chambre.” God, he wished his French were better.
Madame continued to frown. “Je ne comprends pas,” she repeated.
“Madame …,” said David, fully aware that he was sounding more and more like an impatient Englishman Abroad. “I am looking – je cherche, comprenez-vous? – for my wife – ma femme. This morning she was sick – sick, malade, dans l’estomac. I left her asleep while my sons and I went pour manger. Now she has gone. Elle a disparu.”
Madame put down the glass she was polishing, went to the side of the bar, and unhooked the key marked Ch.1. Without a word, she beckoned David to follow her, and stamped ahead of him up the stairs. She flung open the door, stretched out her hand, and said, “Voilà, monsieur.”
David sighed. “I don’t think you understand. I know that my wife isn’t here. What I want to know is, where is she? Où se trouve ma femme?”
Madame shook her head. “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Vous êtes arrivés avec deux fils, n’est-ce pas? Deux fils, oui? Mais, pas de la femme. You understand, monsieur? You arrive with two boys, two sons. But, no wife. Last night you rested in this room tout seul. You were alone.”
“Well, that’s patently ridiculous,” said David. “My wife was sick all night. I just want to know where she is. Maybe she’s gone to the chemist, la pharmacie? Or the doctor? Is there a clinic around here?”
“Ah, oui monsieur. A very short way along the street, only cent metres. But, you had no wife.”
“Of course I had a wife! You saw her yourself! You spoke to her! Do you think I could hallucinate my own wife? All of her things are here – look!”
He wrenched open the door of the small brown-varnished wardrobe, and there was a discordant jingling of wire coat-hangers. Inside hung a navy-blue blazer, a two pairs of trousers, three clean shirts and two ties. On the shelves were socks, underpants, and a neat stack of four clean handkerchiefs. None of Carole’s clothes at all.
For the first time, David felt a genuine sense of dread. He looked at madame and said, “Je ne comprends pas.”
Madame shrugged. “Monsieur, you came here with your two sons. That is all.”
David hesitated, thinking, looking around. Why on earth would Carole have left like that, without telling him? They hadn’t argued. She hadn’t been depressed. Everything had been going swimmingly until she ate that damned cheese in Abbeville.
Madame was about to go back downstairs, but David said, “Wait, s’il-vous plait – un moment” and swung their suitcase on to the bed. They were due to leave tomorrow: maybe Carole had simply packed all her clothes for the want of something to do.
But when he clicked open the catches, and opened the lid, he found that the suitcase was completely empty, apart from a plastic bag crammed with soiled laundry. He tipped the laundry across the bed, but there were no bras, no lacy panties, no rose-embroidered handkerchiefs. All of the laundry was his. Socks, underpants, handkerchiefs initialed with the letter J.
“Monsieur …,” said madame. “I regret that I am very busy.”
“That’s all right, yes,” said David, and madame went back down to the bar, her high-heels banging on the stairs. David let the lid of the case drop; and then he stood in front of the bed and wondered what to do next.
Had Carole left him? Had she really had enough, and taken her clothes, and disappeared? But why would she do it here, in France, on a three-day holiday? She could just as easily have disappeared in England. She could just as easily have said, “David, I need some breathing-space, why don’t we separate for a while?”
He knew that he hadn’t been behaving very well: not as far as Carole was concerned, anyway. He’d been arriving home late
from the office, elated, excited, smelling of drink. But that had been all part of the high – all part of the office adrenaline that had enabled him to finish a first-class corporate identity package in eleven months flat, right on schedule, and nothing missed out, not a single mistake, right down to the visiting cards and the British Allied Fibres ballpens.
But he couldn’t believe that she would have left. Not here, not now. Not without discussing things first. And she adored Robert and Jeremy. How could she have left Robert and Jeremy, without a word?
He opened the boys’ bedroom door. They were wrestling on Jeremy’s bed – or at least, they had been until about a millisecond after they heard his hand on the doorknob. Now they were sitting six feet apart, reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The White Company, sweating, flushed, but very studious.
“Hi, daddy,” said Robert, nonchalantly.
“You haven’t seen mummy?” he asked them.
Robert looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean mummy wasn’t here, when we got back.” He didn’t like to tell them that her clothes had gone, too.
Jeremy shrugged. “Perhaps she felt better. Perhaps she went to that antique shop. She said she liked those china ducks.”
David didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.
“She probably went for a walk, that’s all,” said Robert, going back to his book.
David said, “She did come with us, didn’t she? I mean, she was here?”
They both stared at him. “Of course she was here.”
“It’s just that her clothes have all gone; and her makeup, too, out of the bathroom; and madame downstairs doesn’t seem to remember her.”
“But that’s stupid!” Jeremy protested. “Of course she was here! Her coat’s in the car, and everything!”
Together, they walked across the road. From a second-story window next to La Colonne de Bronze, a fat man in a dark-blue fisherman’s sweater watched them with unabashed curiosity and smoked. In the next window, an old woman in a floral housecoat watched them with unabashed curiosity and knitted.
Fortnight of Fear Page 21
