The Stopping Place

by Helen Slavin

  Nathan Flynn didn’t announce straight out that he was a detective. However, there was something different about his demeanour that told her he wasn’t here to pay Bash for his latest crop of marijuana.

  ‘Do you know where he might be?’ Again that voice. He was a block and tackle of a man, physically confident under his crisp white shirt and his clipped hair. Jeannie didn’t bristle. She didn’t quake. She continued potting on, just glancing at him, casual.

  ‘He’s not here at the minute. Want to…’

  ‘Where is he if he isn’t here?’ His voice was interrogative but polite, as if he knew all the facts already and was just testing her.

  ‘Somewhere else?’ Jeannie volunteered. He took one step nearer, dug his hands deep into the pockets of his raincoat. Jeannie felt suddenly as if she had disappointed him somehow. She didn’t like the feeling. She abandoned what she was doing and brushed off her hands against her trousers.

  ‘Any more specific ideas?’ he asked. She noticed that he had a very direct and inescapable look. Jeannie found herself suddenly having to squint at him, the cloud cleared behind his head and the sunlight was suddenly glaring, like an anglepoise lamp pointed directly into her face.

  ‘It’s a big park. I think he was cutting back the rhododendrons in the maze walk. Want me to show you?’

  For answer he stepped back, against the open potting shed door and swept his arm across himself like an usher, showing her the way.

  So they walked towards the maze walk on the far side of Park House. Not that Bash was there. Jeannie knew for a fact that he’d vanished only half an hour or so before this detective had arrived and that he was probably, right at this moment, busy tending his crop. Hopefully, this little stroll to the maze would give Bash time to get back to the walled garden. She hoped he wasn’t rolling himself a spliff and not thinking straight. If and when he got back he could brew coffee and when she returned with the detective he’d be on his own. There was no reason to give him away, to show the detective, ‘Yes, certainly sir, he’s in his marijuana shed at this very moment.’

  But as she and the detective walked he seemed less interested in hearing about Col Bash and more interested in hearing about her. Questions. Questions. Of course, that was probably his investigative technique, find out what he needed to know, how dishonest she was, from what she might say about herself. In spite of herself Jeannie found herself talking easily to him.

  ‘You ask a lot of questions,’ she mentioned.

  ‘Do I?’ he asked.

  It was the park, the outdoors smell, the creak of the swings. Or maybe it was the deep slate black and green of his eyes, their watchfulness, their carefulness. There was just something. Indefinable. Dangerous probably.

  ‘Detective Constable Flynn by the way.’ He introduced himself as they pulled down the hill towards the boating lake. He offered a hand, dredging it from the deep raincoat pockets. He had strong hands—gripped her as if he was saving her from drowning. Jeannie found it disconcerting that whenever she looked up he was looking right back at her. Didn’t he blink? She stared at his eyes for a few moments as she waffled on about the fact that the rhododendrons were taking over. He didn’t blink. It was like a competition.

  And then they passed into the maze walk, finding green shade in the tunnel of arches, grown over with a hard-to-distinguish collection of climbers and climbing weeds. The maze walk branched off in different directions leading into a central woodland area. There was evidence that Bash had been there earlier—the tractor abandoned, an unattached trailer loaded ready with rhododendron clippings. The debris and detritus. Now she turned and stared once again into Detective Constable Flynn’s eyes as he spoke. It was incredible, this unblinking.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Jeannie continued to stare at his eyes. Now, there was more, a twinkled look. Now, raised eyebrows as he waited for the answer.

  ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’ She couldn’t believe the name came out of her mouth. Cheeky. Flip. She was doing her level best not to blink back now. And then he did it, a fleeting moment in which he crossed his eyes, jokey, just for a second. Jeannie gasped. The timbre of his voice did not alter as he said, straightforward, ‘Got you, Jeannie Gaffney.’

  Jeannie’s eyes locked his, again the twinkled look, and she saw his lips struggle against the forces of smiling. Those articulate eyebrows expressive and questioning. Furred brown caterpillars above his eyes.

  ‘If you knew, why ask? Did you think I would lie?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you think you would?’

  Jeannie thought she had learned her lesson with That Bloody Ryan Boy. She should stay out of the forest, shouldn’t she? Keep to the walled garden. Because here she was again, in the green, feeling tempted.

  Jeannie moved towards the tractor and started hitching up the trailer of cuttings. The keys were in, they could take it back.

  ‘Want a lift?’ she asked and Detective Constable Flynn nodded, climbed up beside her.

  What if he hadn’t? What if she had just shopped Bash that day? Where would Jeannie Gaffney be now? Happily married and running a garden centre, with a litter of children and a nice four-bed detached. Would Geraldine have played grandma on some well-kept back lawn? If stupid, thoughtless Jeannie Gaffney had got on that tractor and taken only the trailer of scraps back to the walled garden. If she’d never laid eyes on Detective Constable Flynn, what might have happened? But she didn’t. And whatever might have been wasn’t. And now it never can be.

  She warned Bash.

  ‘There was a detective looking for you. I don’t think he was a customer but you’d know better,’ she said. And she was surprised how much Bash paled at the news. Jeannie had assumed that if he was willing to run the risk of growing the stuff then surely he couldn’t really have any qualms about it. Couldn’t really be surprised that a detective might come sniffing around. She berated him later, slotted in behind the potting shed, in Troy’s old spot, for chucking away the dog end of a cigarette into the leaf mould.

  ‘I’m off,’ she said, pulling on her jacket, her bag dangling off her shoulder. ‘See you tomorrow?’ and she couched it as a question on purpose. Bash only shrugged. Jeannie turned to go.

  ‘Gaffney?’ he took a long and desperate suck on a new cigarette as Jeannie looked back. ‘Thanks.’

  Detective Constable Flynn was waiting for Jeannie as she left the gates. His car was the only one parked on the small gravel stretch. He was leaning against it and waited for her to draw level with him before speaking.

  ‘Can I repay the favour of the lift?’ he asked. Jeannie shook her head.

  ‘That’s all right. No big favour. I happened to be going your way.’ Jeannie kept walking towards Park Hall, passing the orangery now where the tea shop was, rounding the side of the house where the vista opened up, showing the city sprawled outside the hemmed-in greenery. The road, the bus stop just visible. Detective Constable Flynn locked his car up and followed.

  ‘Police escort?’ Jeannie asked keeping her voice calm and steady. He shrugged. His eyes unblinking again, asking to be looked into, demanding that she look right at him, as if there was something he wished her to see.

  ‘I’m going your way.’

  Jeannie felt again that she was disappointing him somehow. She shoved the thought aside. It was just a guilty conscience; she should say something about the marijuana crop, about the shed and the padlock. But actually, he hadn’t asked.

  ‘You know he’s been in prison?’ Detective Constable Flynn offered, kicking at an errant football as they skirted the top edge of the playing field. Jeannie did not avoid his gaze. Once again they were locked in a staring competition and she knew exactly what he was reading from her eyes even as she couldn’t make anything out in his.

  ‘I do now.’

  In that moment he had changed her perception of Col Bash. In prison. For what? What crimes had he committed? She didn’t think she wanted to know. Now who was disappointed? With herself mostly. Disappointed tha
t she could let something like this spoil the way she thought about Bash. He was just Bash. Laidback. Kind. No questions asked. Did it matter?

  ‘Theft. Burglary. Bit of credit card fraud.’

  ‘Not a lot of opportunity for that in Parks and Gardens,’ Jeannie replied. Detective Constable Flynn nodded agreement and checked his watch.

  ‘I’m off duty as of ten seconds ago. Would you like to come out for a drink?’ He didn’t miss a step. Jeannie looked at him, then at the bus as it pulled up.

  ‘My bus is here,’ she said simply.

  ‘Miss it,’ he challenged her.

  When the bus pulled away she looked back, saw he was still standing by the stone gateposts, still watching. He didn’t wave. Then he turned and walked back up the hill towards his car.

  * * *

  The next morning Bash did not show up for work. The first thing Jeannie did, apart from start the coffee pot brewing as if nothing was amiss, was walk over to the padlocked gate and dirty up the padlock. By the time she’d finished, it looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. There were a couple of the planks that they used for walking across the beds stretched across the path and Jeannie angled a couple in the doorway.

  If you had stood in the potting shed that day, sipping hot coffee and asking Jeannie why she’d done this she would have said straight away, ‘Elspeth Rideout’. She felt she had already unwittingly betrayed one person and she was not going to betray another. This time, she knew the secrets. It was not as if Bash had asked her help in burying a body under the asparagus beds. It was just some plants. It was none of her business. But Jeannie felt it had been made into her business on the day that she had walked into the walled garden and he had said simply, ‘You all right?’

  This is who Jeannie was. She couldn’t cast things off.

  Who am I kidding? This is who she was? This is who I am? I’ve tried casting it all off, I’ve tried and I feel like Atlas holding up the world. I can’t take a step forward or I’ll topple. She’ll topple. My twin existence. If she goes, I know I go.

  Nathan Flynn appeared daily for the rest of the month. Jeannie assumed he was dogged in his pursuit of Bash. He seemed to appear out of the air and there was always a slight twinkle in his eyes when she startled. Jeannie lost herself in her work. They were moving into peak season and the walled garden was beginning to burst with flowers and produce and Jeannie, true to her form, was tackling it all virtually single-handed. She instructed the college lads and sent them on their ways around the park. She was in every morning by six and never home before eight. Her own small plot at the back of her flat was overgrown and wild.

  ‘It’s like the Garden of Dorian Gray,’ Ted Gaffney joked when he popped round one evening and, as they opened the French doors to sit with a cup of tea and let the summer air in, the tangled entwinement of ivy and honeysuckle and bindweed burst into the living room. Ted Gaffney propped it up on the top of Jeannie’s stepladder. Later that evening as Geraldine arrived with lemon chicken and rocket salad and wine, they all took scissors and secateurs and cut back and pinned up and revealed a canopy of stars in the ink blue above. The fresh cut scents of earth and grass and sap perfumed the evening. Geraldine and Ted headed home very late.

  Bash had not officially been seen around and Jeannie had heard the agricultural college lads chewing over the rumour that he’d skipped out of town altogether. Jeannie thought about his last crop damping off in the shed. She had the key. It had appeared one afternoon looped over a hook on the back of the door and Jeannie knew only Bash could have put it there. She put it into her pocket attached to her keychain. Was that what he wanted? Safekeeping? What might it mean if a criminal trusted you?

  Jeannie found herself worrying that Bash might need the money from the last crop. What did criminals on the run do? How did they live? Perhaps even now he was brewing coffee in another potting shed in another town park.

  At first, Nathan’s time in the walled garden seemed to be taken with standing, hands in pockets, asking about her college days. Asking about her home life. Asking.

  Jeannie felt hedged in at first, suspected his motives. He was a policeman. He wanted to get his man. But then he also appeared to want to get his hands dirty, squatting on his haunches to hand her bedding plants or bulbs. Holding the apex of a pyramid of bamboo canes, taking over the tying off if her fingers fumbled or cracked with mud.

  She looked at his face in those moments, at the lines and curves. Tried to see what he might be. Looking away from the fact that what he wanted was her, that no petty criminal marijuana farmer was worth all these hours of investigation. It worried her, that she grew to miss him, to anticipate him, to want to see his eyes looking back at hers with their intelligence. She worried that she was seeing things from the wrong angle. That after all, he was a police officer. He thought that she was in league with Bash, that she might, at any moment have a slip of the trowel and tell him all.

  There was nothing to tell. Except of course, the spliff shed was still there.

  Jeannie had been down the path once to check on the crop. She realised that Bash had known exactly what he was doing in giving her custody of the key. He had known she couldn’t stand by and let the plants die. This was a woman who couldn’t prick out any seedling that had bothered to germinate. She watered and she tended and thought about Nathan Flynn, hands in pockets, half expecting him to materialise behind her, cuffs in hand.

  After two months it was official that Col Bash was not coming back. Morag from the small cramped office at County Hall arrived. Her runabout car churned over the gravel and she reached her clunky briefcase, like a heavy leather brick, out of the hatchback boot. Jeannie saw her take out her purple flowered wellies. The boot of Morag’s car was obsessively neat. A colour coded range of plastic crates organised everything.

  Morag had come to ask Jeannie to take on Bash’s responsibilities. She was displeased that Jeannie had used her initiative and gone ahead with all the tasks anyway. Morag had lots to say about her own failure to ‘rehabilitate’ someone like Bash. She was keen to point out that she hadn’t been keen to take on an ‘effing jailbird’ in the first place. It was that woolly-headed twat in HR that liaised all the time with the halfway house people and the probation service.

  ‘They couldn’t wait to take him on. All because he got a silver gilt at Chelsea with some effing prison garden. Effing Chelsea my left eyeball.’

  Jeannie didn’t like Morag.

  ‘I can’t pay you for what you’ve been doing, you know that? There won’t be back pay. I haven’t the budgetary capacity.’ Morag looked harassed. Jeannie didn’t care about back pay. She cared that the park looked lush and jungly, that people were assailed on all sides by scent and flower. She cared that she’d put out bird feeders and people had sighted bullfinches and jays. She cared that she had coloured the park in. It was hers.

  After Morag left Jeannie took a walk around her territory. She paced every section from the steeply hummocked rise housing the radio aerial tower in the north, winding down to the Farm Zoo and the cleared space where the ornamental birds had been and the new wildlife ponds were being dug out. Along Copper Beech Drive to the boating lake, around in a sweep through the dense trees towards the Folly, a huge archway in stone buttressed by carved satyrs. She had let it become just a little overgrown here and got some of the work experience lads to move the stone benches from in front of Park Hall. Then, back, up, up, up the long pull towards the walled garden in the East. To the potting shed. To the smell of fresh coffee, although that she hadn’t left any boiling, and some of the strawberries.

  To Col Bash, waiting with two mugs. He was looking thinner than usual and had the beginnings of a beard to balance out his newly shorn hair. He had waited to make certain she was alone before appearing. Who knows how long he had been hiding out in the outbuilding, biding time. Not a word. Just put the mug of coffee down on the countertop and picked up her keys.

  Jeannie moved down to the spliff shed with him. The crop
was wild, but still harvestable. Bash looked at her, his eyes almost teary with thanks. A nod.

  ‘You. On your way.’ He winked. Jeannie turned. She had some planting to do in the new wildlife ponds. She walked. Did not look back.

  When she returned much later and much wetter, the padlocked gate stood wide open. The shed too was unlocked, all evidence of the plants removed and in its place a collection of broken wheelbarrows and old pots.

  In the potting shed a week later she found the parcel of money in the pocket of her battered leather jerkin. She had felt in there for the KitKat she’d stowed there yesterday and instead her fingers touched the ribbon. A yellow ribbon, it turned out, from the Easter pots they’d done. She lifted the roll of money. There was a smudge of a thumbprint. The smudge of a memory. Bash that first day, muddied hands. You’ll do.

  It didn’t seem to matter how late she was, Nathan Flynn managed to wait for her. His working hours were as erratic as her own but he tried to walk her to the bus stop each night. Once as the 8.35 evening bus pulled away she caught sight of him in his car drawing up at the park gates. Another evening he was asleep in his car and she waited for him to wake, finishing the last of the small tidy-up jobs, until she dropped the secateurs and he was there to pick them up. Another occasion she saw him again from the bus. Running, too late, down the hill towards the stop.

  One morning she arrived at six a.m. She had walked from town in the clean early sunshine with a bag of almond croissants from the French patisserie. She had been thinking about Nathan, about a dream she’d had. She’d been, as ever, naked in the walled garden. She pushed open the gate but this time when she fell Nathan Flynn caught her. He caught her and she woke as she landed in his arms.

  She was startled now to see his car parked by the gates. He was inside it, sleeping again. The driver’s seat tipped backwards, his raincoat pulled around him. Jeannie opened the gates, brewed coffee in Col Bash’s old pot. Put the croissants in the heated propagator. Later they ate together, saying nothing.