“Did you know any of the people who lived in the flats while it was a brothel?” Kit asked, feeling free to do so now that the old lady had finally conceded that prostitutes had operated there—but she had phrased the question badly.
“Know any?” was the affronted reply. “What would I want with knowing people like that? I buy my fags full-price—more than full-price—and I don’t talk to streetwalkers.”
“The men who ring my buzzer keep asking for Rose,” Kit said. “Did you ever hear of a Rose?”
“Didn’t take any notice of any names,” the old lady told her—but after a moment’s tokenistic hesitation, she let her tongue run away with her again. “Anyway, that sort don’t use their real names—Natashas and Tatianas and the like, mostly, except for the coloreds. Shipped in like luggage through that tunnel. God’s gift to the white slave trade, that tunnel. And containers. Whole bloody Third World’ll fetch up here if we aren’t careful, and the Russians too now that the Iron Curtain’s down. Soft touch, we are. Everybody knows. No Roses where you live, believe me. Weeds, the lot of them, and poisonous.”
“I suppose the neighborhood’s got more violent, too,” Kit prompted, carefully. “Places like number 21 used to attract trouble.”
By this time, the old lady was warmed up, and getting her to carry on talking was no more difficult than getting a sex-starved student into bed—although it was much less satisfactory on a moment-by-moment basis, and it lasted a hell of a lot longer. Getting the old lady to stick to the point became increasingly difficult, but Kit figured that she had time to spare, and that anything that kept her from another long evening of isolation in the attic was to be welcomed. After an hour of patient probing, Kit was fairly certain that she had determined everything that the old lady had to impart. It was disappointingly slight, but there were a few little nuggets of real information contained within it. Although the name Rose Selavy meant nothing to Mrs. Gaunt, the old lady’s brief career as a nark had involved farming the cards left in the local phone booths, and she confirmed that some of them had advertised services that caused her mind to boggle. On the other hand, although the owner of a sleazy hotel two streets away had been hacked to death with machetes on his own doorstep in 1997 and a woman in the next street who had once worked the tills in Marks and Sparks had been bludgeoned to death by her ex less than six months later, there had never actually been a murder in this street—“Thank God,” Mrs. Gaunt had added to that statement, although faith in God didn’t seem to be one of her more cherished convictions.
“Are you sure that no one was ever murdered in number 21?” Kit asked, anxious to be sure.
“Sure?” Mrs. Gaunt echoed. “All I’m sure of is that the police never came out about it if anybody was. Illegal immigrants, see—could have been dumped in the river without anyone ever knowing they was here, or anyone caring. Don’t know what goes on any more. Not like the old days, when everybody knew everybody and kids used to play out in the road.”
If Rose Selavy had died in the attic of number 21, Kit concluded, she had done so without causing a scandal. If she had been murdered there, her death had either been covered up, or been made to look like something other than a murder—which presumably meant that her murderer, if there was any such person, remained unapprehended, and that Rose herself was still unmourned, unavenged, and possibly unidentified.
If ghosts really existed, Kit thought, that was surely more than enough reason for Rose Selavy to be restless in her grave.
Mrs. Gaunt had no idea what had become of the other people who had lived at number 21 before the council took it over. The notion that the landlord had skipped the country while most of his girls had been deported seemed to be pure guesswork. For all the old lady really knew—which was considerably less than she was prepared to say—the owner and his tenants might simply have traded up to better-situated and better-appointed premises when the house-price explosion had tempted him to unlock that particular chunk of equity, especially if he was broadening his scope to take in other kinds of smuggling. Unfortunately, the conversation didn’t bring Kit a single step closer to making contact with someone who had known the person behind Rose Selavy well enough to make an informed guess as to what had become of her.
By the time Kit managed to bring the interview to a close Mrs. Gaunt seemed to have forgiven her for being foreigner, and was almost prepared to welcome her as a new friend. She even told Kit that she would ask around to see if she could find anyone who had known the mysterious Rose, and would try to have some news for her if she cared to drop around on Sunday—but Kit doubted that the old lady’s interrogation techniques would to be up to the job of finding out anything useful. There were some exercises in detection, she reflected glumly as the door of the basement flat closed behind her, for which even a lifetime of gossiping experience could not adequately prepare a woman.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Because it was now too late to think about cooking, Kit went back up to the Oxford Road in search of a takeaway, but had to hang around for ages to get a pizza made up to her careful specification. By the time she returned to number 21 it was coming up to nine o’clock and lighting-up time again. She was utterly astonished to be intercepted by Mancunian Liz as she passed along the second-floor landing and told that “some bloke” had phoned and left a message asking her to ring him right away, because he had something to tell her. She had to run upstairs to get the number of Stephen’s mobile, and she dumped the pizza-box on the table while she ran back down the stairs to the phone.
“What have you found out?” she wanted to know.
“I can’t tell you over the phone,” he said, enigmatically. “Part of it I’ll have to show you. I can meet you in the Rifleman in half an hour if you can get there that fast.”
“Bugger that,” she said. “I’ve got a pizza going cold upstairs, and the Fox and Goose is just around the corner. You’ll have to pay your bus fare this time, though. Mentioning my name to the driver won’t get you a free ride.”
“I don’t know what your full name is,” he reminded her. “Or even the first part of it, really. I know hers now, though—her real name, that is, not just her stage name. And I just might be able to reveal the secret of the shadows in the wall.”
“Clever boy,” Kit said. “You must have found a better busybody than the one I’ve been drinking tea with since half-past six. Bring that CD with you, will you. I want to hear the real thing.”
Even Stephen made it to the Fox and Goose in forty minutes flat, which was quite an achievement, considering the paucity of the after-six timetable. It hadn’t taken Kit anywhere near that long to finish the pizza, but she’d taken a little extra time to freshen up before she went to meet him, so she only beat him by ten minutes and hadn’t even got half way through her pint.
The student had a small brown paper bag with him, apparently containing an oblong box about five inches by three by three, but he didn’t open it to show her what was inside. He did turn down the edges of both his jacket pockets, though, to let her see just how seriously he’d taken her last-minute request.
If they averaged sixty minutes play each, Kit calculated, there were enough CDs in those pockets to see them through to morning, even if they left the pub well before closing time and didn’t bother to turn the CD player off while they were otherwise occupied.
“You want another?” he asked.
“Just top that off with a half,” she said, magnanimously, handing him her glass.
The Fox and Goose didn’t have cider on draught, so Stephen treated himself to a bottle of strong cider, telling the barman not to bother with a glass. He seemed very pleased with himself—almost smug. He was obviously hoping, and expecting, that once they got back to her room they would be “otherwise occupied” for at least some of the time. He hadn’t thrown himself into the business of playing detective just to take his mind off his recently-completed studies.
“Okay,” said Kit. “Who was she? Tatiana or Natasha?”
/> Stephen seemed slightly surprised by her choice of examples. “Her real name was Violet Leverhulme,” Stephen said, after taking a long luxurious sip from the neck of his bottle. The extra outlay on the strong cider had been offset by a slight reduction in the price of her John Smith’s—the Fox and Goose was just as authentic as the Rifleman, but it was in a part of town where no one was expected to pay through the nose for “character”. Kit wasn’t entirely surprised to discover that Mrs. Gaunt’s speculations about illegal immigrants from behind the tattered Iron Curtain had been a little over-generalized.
“How did you find that out?” Kit asked, because the student was obviously waiting for her to marvel at his ingenuity.
“Friends in the law department,” he said. “They’ve all got sponsors in solicitors’ offices and the like. Everything’s available on-line nowadays, if you know where to look and how to get in. She had no convictions for soliciting from your address, but she was busted twice while she was in the attic bedsit for possession of class A drugs. It’s all on the police computer. Violet Leverhulme, alias Rose Selavy. Fined the first time, sentenced to three months in a young offender’s institution the second. Cunning plan, hey? Punish an addict by sending her to Heroin City.”
“Do you know for sure that she was an addict?”
“Absolutely.” The way he said it spoke volumes.
“Because that’s how she died,” Kit deduced. “She is dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes. But she didn’t overdose while she was living in your room—she didn’t go back there after doing her stretch. Her last known address was the other side of the Oxford road, half a mile further out. She’s only been dead just over three months—which might help to explain why none of the previous tenants felt her presence. No suspicious circumstances, according to the coroner, but I don’t know how hard the police bothered to look. It might have been suicide rather than a mistake, or even murder, but who cares? They probably figured that she was just an accident waiting to happen and the sooner she was out of the way the better. Contributory negligence, isn’t that the phrase?”
“I’ve only been in the room three months and a week,” Kit mused, wondering if the coincidence of timing was significant. “But if she died somewhere else, why is she haunting the attic at number 21? Why is she haunting me?”
“I’m no expert,” Stephen said, “but isn’t Leverhulme a northern name? Maybe she’s looking for someone who reminds her of home and happier times.”
“She’s probably from Lancashire,” Kit informed him, stonily. “I’m Yorkshire. There’s a difference. And there’s at least as much difference between a bus-driver and a whore as there is between a Yorkshirewoman and a Lancastrian.”
“How did you come to end up driving buses?” he asked, changing the subject even though he hadn’t flinched from her sarcasm. He was a lot cockier than he’d been on the occasion of their previous meeting, and not just because he’d fucked her once already. He figured that because he had found out about Violet Leverhulme through his mates in the law department he was now the one in the driving-seat of their acquaintance. Kit decided that she might as well let him go on thinking that, at least for a little while. She still wanted to hear the CDs, and to find out what was in the brown paper bag.
“I already told you,” she said, figuring that they could get back to the point later. “It’s a vocation. Dad was a driver—HGV. Still is. On his way back from Barcelona as we speak. Not that he wanted me to follow in his footsteps, of course. When I got decent GCSEs he and mum expected me to stay on for A levels, but I couldn’t wait to get on with my life. I got a job biking pizzas for Domino’s until I could lay my hands on a full licence, then went on the vans for a parcel courier. I was aiming for HGVs but when the chance to train as a bus-jockey came up. I took it. Did a couple of years on local point-to-points, then moved up to middle-distance. All one-man vehicles. Personally, I’d rather drive a Routemaster and not have to muck about with the fares, but we all have to take life as we find it, don’t we?”
She paused to let him take his turn, but he was putting on a show of being genuinely interested. so she carried on. “I spent most of last year going down to Chesterfield and up to Pontefract like a yo-yo. Dad was always telling me to be careful my bus didn’t vanish from human ken in the Yorkshire triangle. That’s Hell, Hull and Halifax—a joke much older than all the crap about Bermuda. I wanted to get away from home—needed my own space. When the company here started poaching I figured Why not? After all, south is the way Yorkshire girls are supposed to go to seek their fortune, and Chesterfield’s crooked spire is only the first landmark on the way. Little did I know. Why is Reading pronounced to rhyme with bedding and wedding when it’s spelled as if it rhymed with kneading and pleading?”
He was forced to reply to that. “I think it used to be spelled with two ds back in the sixteenth century,” he said. “It wasn’t a town then, of course—just an extremely rich Abbey. All the land for miles around belonged to it, so it would have had a lot of tenants. Not just farmers but tradesmen—masons, smiths, brewers, and the like. Then Henry VIII waltzed in and grabbed the lot. You can still see the last few stones of the Abbey ruins over by the Forbury. I don’t know when or why the spelling changed—maybe it was just that the people who inherited the local authority after the monks had gone were illiterate. It’s always been pronounced the way it’s pronounced now.”
“Pity. The alternative would have so much more class, and it’d be the ideal place for a university. So, what do you want to do when you grow up?”
“God knows,” he said. “First I’ve got to see what kind of degree I get when the results come out. Anything but teaching and the media, I suppose—not that a degree in History of Art qualifies you for much else. I spotted Rose Selavy right off, though, didn’t I? And I might be able to set your mind at rest regarding the shadows in the walls. If so, never let it be said that art history doesn’t have its practical side.”
“How?” Kit wanted to know.
“Like I said, I’ll have to show you.”
She couldn’t help but wonder whether that was just a line, to make absolutely certain that she would invite him back to her room again, even though he’d already told her about Violet Leverhulme, but she figured that it didn’t really matter either way. He’d already done more than enough to be entitled to his reward, and it was rather sweet of him to be so keen. Even so, she asked him if he wanted another; she didn’t want to seem to eager.
“I guess,” he said. She bought him another bottle, and got her empty glass refilled.
“Did you find out any more about this Lanky Violet?” she asked. “There must be more, mustn’t there—after all, if every junkie prostitute became a fully-fledged and hyperactive ghost, the whole bloody country would be lousy with them, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess so—imagine trying to catch a train at King’s Cross! But that’s an old problem. If everybody who died became a haunter, there’d be spectral queues everywhere. The conventional thinking seems to be that the majority pass over successfully—just move towards the light, as they say in the movies—while the ones that don’t make it are trapped here by unfinished business. Messages to deliver, vengeances to be wrought—that sort of thing.”
“Conventional thinking?” she challenged.
“Well,” he said, “conventional unconventional thinking, if you don’t mind the oxymoron. An oxymoron....”
“I’m not stupid,” she reminded him. “I know what a fucking oxymoron is.”
He took it in his stride. “Yeah, sorry. Well, I suppose what I mean is what passes for conventional thinking in such reservoirs of unconventional thinking as Fortean Times. Also in the movies, of course. The Sixth Sense and such like. The kid who can see dead people attracts dead people because the dead people don’t have too many opportunities to get their point of view across. Ghosts may be rare, but people who can see ghosts may be rarer still. Have you ever seen, heard and smelled any others?”
“No,” she said, tersely. “Before Rose, I was a virgin.” Kit could tell that he wanted to make a crack about that, but she was relieved to discover that he didn’t quite dare. He left it to her to add: “Unfortunately, the way reputations work these days, there’s only one small step between virgin and slut.” she became aware that her heartbeat had speeded up, as if something deep inside her were trying to get a mayday through to her brain.
“On the bright side,” Stephen put in, “recent conventional unconventional thinking seems to tend to the view that ghosts aren’t actually evil, or even malevolent. Your real eighteen-carat Amityville Horror is thought to be something much nastier than a dead person, dead persons being, on the whole, just persons who happen to be dead. No better and no worse, etc.”
“So where does the Hellfire come in?” she asked him, quietly. “What does kissing the goat entitle a person to?”
“There’s no consensus on that,” he admitted. “But the whole Church of Satan thing is carrying forward a Hellfire Club tradition started by eighteenth century libertines. Sympathy for the Devil goes back to Blake and Shelley, who saw Satan as a Romantic rebel against divine tyranny. The whole idea of Hell is obsolete, of course—it was never anything more than priestly terrorism, invented in the hope of forcing goodness on people who couldn’t see any earthly payoff in refraining from sin. Melodrama needs villains, and Satan is the daddy of them all...but there’s never been any shortage of people ready, willing and eager to sell their souls.”
“You didn’t actually answer my original question,” Kit pointed out, having only just realized the fact herself. Did you find out any more about Violet Leverhulme?”
“No,” he admitted, “I don’t have much more...yet. Public records tend to be a bit sparse. She was born on the 13th of March 1976, if that helps.”
“Not much,” Kit told him. “I’m a Scorpio myself. Being born in the previous year, possibly in a neighboring county, hardly seems sufficient to establish a link between our destinies. I still can’t see any reason why she’d want to haunt me instead of the present tenant of the place where she died.”
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story Page 6
